Posted on 09/17/2013 10:26:58 PM PDT by TexGrill
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's military shot and killed a man who undertook a rare attempt to enter North Korea on Monday by floating across a river that runs near the heavily militarized border, an official in Seoul said.
It was not clear whether the man was a South Korean, the official said on condition of anonymity. The military was still trying to recover the body and investigating the incident, he said.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said South Korean guards had called out to the man to return. But he ignored the instructions, jumped into the Imjin River and clung to a buoy to try to float across.
Yonhap quoted a military official as saying the shooting was justified as the identity of the man was unknown and he could have been a North Korean soldier.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Why, in G_ds name, would anybody want to defect to North Korea? And why shoot him ... let him go. Even if he were a North Korean solder, if he wanted to go back to that hell hole, let him go.
Probably a spy or a scout. Bunch of them planned to attack the Blue House (presidential palace) in 1968. Didn’t get near the mansion but killed quite a few Korean soldiers and four American soldiers.
Who knows, but on the scene it may have been suspected as an agent completing a mission, or someone returning to NK with information.
What’s the point of killing him? He would have been no threat, even if he were a spy.
A little more from Voice of America....sounds like they were afraid this could become an international incident (remember, it doesn’t take much to set the North Koreans off...)
“Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok says the use of deadly force was justified because of the military sensitivity of the heavily armed border. Min-seok said the border is so sensitive because South Korea and North Korea are still under a cease-fire agreement from 1953, and therefore when a person violates the regulation the military is allowed to shoot.”
A little more about the swimmer...
“The man was later found to be unarmed and identified as 47-year-old Nam Yong-ho by the South Korean passport he was carrying. It also showed he had been expelled from Japan earlier this year after being denied an application for political asylum.”
http://www.voanews.com/content/south-korean-military-defends-shooting-of-defector/1751164.html
That was pretty darn stupid
He may have been carrying a lot of information to the enemy
how can there be an international incident when both of them claim to represent the whole peninsula?
There is a lot of Koreans in Japan who support the north. I dunno why.
Her entire family could be killed or thrown into the gulag for this, siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents all.
http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=10983
t has been reported that the teenage daughter of an elite member of the North Korean security services recently defected while studying at a foreign language university in Beijing, and is now under investigation in South Korea.
Kim Yong Hwa, who heads a Seoul-based NGO dedicated to helping refugees, confirmed the news yesterday, saying that the organization had been approached directly to assist in the defection process, and had helped the 18-year old girl to leave China.
The girl, known only as “Miss Han,” then travelled to South Korea via Southeast Asia with the assistance of the South Korean authorities.
Few details of the girl have been made public, but according to Kim, her father is a top public security official in the North Korean capital, making him the equivalent of a metropolitan chief of police.
Kim has been reported as noting that the young girl’s defection became known earlier this year, and may have contributed to North Korea’s specific insistence that a group of nine teenage defectors be returned to the country by the Laotian authorities at the end of May.
Elite-level defections from Pyongyang are exceedingly rare, meaning that defectors from Pyongyang constitute a very small percentage of the total defector population in the South.
The South Korean authorities have not confirmed the defection.
We’re talking about North Korea here. They almost went to war over chopping down a tree....
Any chance it could be Dennis Rodman?
They beat Americans to death literally over the tree. Of course the tree was just a pretext.
Well yeah....and this defector could well end up as another pretext.
But I sort of get the impression that the real reason for shooting in this case is that this happens so rarely that the officers just did not know how to react....confusion, pure and simple.
probably true
Insane. Just let the silly bastard go. The oriental mind is still inscrutable to me.
One problem is that an armed South Korean national showing up in NK could not only get shot for his trouble, but be used as an excuse for war.
“South Korea just invaded us!”
...and technically, they’d be correct. You can’t let armed South Koreans cross the border into NK.
Of course, at a distance, you might not be able to discern if he was armed or not. Too bad for him...on the DMZ you have to shoot him to be sure.
True, but on the other hand, it’s sort of a propaganda coup for the North : “Look, the South Korean lackeys of the American dogs shoot people who try to leave for the North! Does that sound like freedom to you?”
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