South Korea guards open fire as North’s troops hunt for defector

SOUTH Korean guards fired up to 20 warning shots at North Korean troops as they searched for a comrade who had fled across the border.

It is the second defection of a North Korean solider in just over a month and comes amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang’s build-up of nuclear weapons. A “low-ranking” soldier who was reportedly aged 19 arrived at a frontline South Korean guard post in heavy fog just after 8am on Thursday.

South Korean military officials said no shots were fired when the soldier crossed the border. But around 90 minutes later about 20 rounds from a K-3 machine gun were fired to warn off a patrol of North Korean soldiers who were apparently looking for their comrade. About 40 minutes later, two bursts of gunfire were heard in the North, but officials said there were no indications of any bullets crossing to the South.

The defection is the fourth time this year a North Korean soldier has fled across the world’s most heavily armed border. The incident came a month after the rare defection of a North Korean soldier under a hail of bullets from his own side at Panmunjom, the truce village where opposing forces confront each other across a concrete dividing line.

A dramatic video showed the soldier speeding down a tree-lined road, headlights on, past shocked North Korean soldiers, who ran after him.

He crashed the jeep into a ditch near the line that divides North and South. The man then lay injured in a mass of leaves before South Korean soldiers took him away to safety. Two North Korean civilians also defected this week and were found drifting in an engineless boat off the South’s eastern coast, Yonhap news agency said.

The pair “expressed their willingness to defect”, South Korea’s unification ministry said. Their claim for asylum was being investigated.

The developments bring this year’s total for the number of people defecting directly to the South to 15, three times as many as in 2016.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for North Korea’s foreign ministry said yesterday that Pyongyang was not linked to any cyber attacks, its first response since the US and British governments publicly blamed it for orchestrating the spread of the Wannacry ransomware that infected more than 200,000 victims in around 150 countries.