North Korean defects to South by crossing Yellow Sea maritime border

North Koreans regularly flee country to escape Kim Jong-un’s isolated regime but rarely through sea

A North Korean defected to South Korea crossing the maritime border in an apparent attempt to flee Kim Jong-un’s repressive regime, according to media reports.

The defector was one of two individuals who attempted to escape North Korea by sea and enter South Korea’s Gyodong Island, which is separated from the North by a narrow stretch of water less than five kilometres wide, reported Yonhap.

One of them made it to the South Korean land border on foot on a low tide day on Thursday. The defector crossed the Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea, the de facto inter-Korean sea boundary off the west coast.

The second person is believed to be missing after failing to cross the border, the Newsis agency said.

South Korea‘s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the person has been handed over to the authorities, which are conducting an investigation into the incident.

They would investigate how the person crossed the border and whether the person intended to defect.

Ri Il Gyu, a former political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba who defected to South Korea last November, speaks during an interview (AP)

Defence minister Shin Won-sik told parliament that the individual was tracked from the point of departure by the South Korean military, calling it a “successful defection”.

It marks the latest defection 10 months after a group of North Koreans that included three women and one man crossed the maritime border from the east on a wooden boat in October 2023.

North Koreans frequently flee their country to avoid poverty and political oppression, with an estimated 30,000 such cases reported since the peninsula was divided by war in the 1950s.

Most escapees from the North try to enter the South through China and Southeast Asia, avoiding the heavily defended maritime frontier.

However, some have taken the shorter but more arduous sea route following tighter land-border controls imposed by Pyongyang during the Covid-19 outbreak when many people, including diplomats tried to flee the country.

The number of successful escapees drastically declined from 2020, after Pyongyang sealed its border and issued shoot-on-sight orders on the frontier with China to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

In 2023, the number of people who escaped South Korea tripled to 196 with more elites such as diplomats as well as students trying to escape. It was significantly up from 76 defections in 2022.

In one of the high-profile defections, a North Korean diplomat in Cuba defected to South Korea with his family in November last year, the South Korean spy agency said last month.