Video captures dramatic defection of N. Korean soldier
SEOUL, South Korea — It’s 3:11 p.m. on a gray day on the North Korean side of the most heavily armed border in the world, and a soldier is racing toward freedom.
His dark olive-green jeep speeds down a straight, tree-lined road, past barren fields across the replacement for the Bridge of No Return, which was used for prisoner exchanges during the Korean War. The shock of soldiers watching the jeep rush by is palpable from the video released Wednesday, and no wonder: They’re beginning to realize that one of their comrades is defecting to the South. They sprint after him. The jeep slows and turns at a monument to North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. The border is near, South Korea just beyond it.
Four North Korean soldiers, weapons in their hands, race by the blue huts that straddle the line and are familiar to anyone who has toured the spot on the border where North and South Korean soldiers face off.
Right at the line that divides North from South, the defector crashes the jeep into a ditch. Seconds pass as he tries in vain to gun the vehicle out of the gully before leaping out and sprinting into the South. He kicks up leaves, ducking below a branch just as the North Korean soldiers skid into view.
Muzzles flash. The North Korean soldiers fire at the defector at close range with handguns and AK-47 assault rifles.
Suddenly, two of the North Koreans run away while a soldier in the leaves jumps up and dashes across the dividing line into South Korean territory before stopping, turning on his heels and sprinting back to the northern side after his comrades. The defector falls stretched out and unmoving in a pile of leaves against a small wall on the South Korean side. The entire sequence lasts four minutes.
It unfolded Nov. 13 in the Joint Security Area, which is overseen by both the American-led U.N. Command and North Korea and lies inside the 2½-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone.
Forty minutes later, the video has switched to infrared to show the heat signatures of two South Korean soldiers as they crawl on their hands and knees toward the prone defector. They grab hold of the defector and drag him to safety.
North and South Korean soldiers didn’t exchange fire during the shooting, the first in the area in more than three decades.
The defection, subsequent surgeries and slow recovery of the soldier have riveted South Korea. But his escape is a huge embarrassment for the North, which claims all defections are the result of rival Seoul kidnapping or enticing North Koreans. Pyongyang has said nothing about the defection.