A 30-year-old South Korean defected to communist North Korea by crossing the heavily fortified border dividing the two Koreas, Pyongyang’s state media said on Tuesday.
The man crossed into North Korea on Monday and was in the country’s “warm care,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch monitored in Seoul.
It would be a rare instance of defection from South Korea to the impoverished North, though thousands have defected from North Korea to the more affluent South in recent years. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Intelligence Service spy agency said they were checking the report.
KCNA identified the man as Kang Tong Rim, a native of South Jeolla Province, and said he crossed the border in the east.
Kang had harboured a “longing” for North Korea, and tried to defect several times while serving mandatory military service for South Korea between 2001-2003, KCNA said. Kang had worked at “Samsung Semiconductor” before moving to a pig farm in southern South Korea, the report said.
“He is pleased with the accomplishment of his desire for defection,” KCNA said.
It was not clear if “Samsung Semiconductor” mentioned in KCNA refers to Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest manufacturer of computer memory chips. But Samsung Electronics said that no one by the name of the alleged defector was employed there.
The two Koreas remain in a state of war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953. The division of the peninsula split up millions of Korean families, with most unable to contact relatives on the other side of the border.
South Korea’s anti—communist National Security Law bars citizens from making unauthorized visits to North Korea.
Last month, a 54-year-old South Korean was sentenced to a suspended prison term for trying unsuccessfully to defect to North Korea through a North Korean diplomatic mission in China earlier this year. The man reportedly said he wanted to live in his father’s homeland.
In 2007, another South Korean entered the North via the Chinese-North Korean border but was expelled. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
