A North Korean soldier defected to the South on Thursday across the heavily-guarded Demilitarised Zone that divides the peninsula, Seoul’s defence ministry said, only a month after a comrade did the same under a hail of bullets from his own side. The “low-ranking” soldier was spotted by South Korean soldiers using surveillance equipment as he crossed the midwestern part of the land border in thick fog and made his way to a guard post, a ministry spokesman said.
No shots were fired at the time, he said, but South Korean troops later fired around 20 rounds from a K-3 machine gun to warn off Northern guards who approached the border apparently looking for the man. The incident came a month after a rare and dramatic defection by a soldier at Panmunjom, the truce village where opposing forces confront each other across a concrete dividing line. On that occasion the defector drove to the heavily-guarded border at speed and ran across under a hail of bullets from his own side. He was hit at least four times. Footage showed the badly injured man being pulled to safety by two South Korean soldiers who crawled to reach him just south of the demarcation line.
He has since been recovering in hospital in the South. Away from Panmunjom, the rest of the 4-kilometre-wide DMZ bristles with barbed wire and is littered with minefields, making any crossing extremely hazardous. Thursday’s defection was the fourth by a soldier across the DMZ this year. Two North Korean civilians also defected this week after being found drifting in a rickety engineless boat off South's eastern coast, Yonhap news agency reported.
