Rome, July 18, 2023 – An American soldier defected to North Korea today. Corporal Second Class Travis King unexpectedly crossed the demarcation line separating South Korea from the area controlled by Pyongyang. The soldier was arrested immediately, and Pentagon sources had no doubt: “He deserted,” CNN and CBS reported.
He had to be repatriated
The reasons why King preferred North Korea’s closed system to the Western world are not yet clear, but from what is known, the corporal was arrested and had to be returned for disciplinary reasons only today, but he managed to escape. The incident took place in Panmunjom, the same city on the border where the armistice was signed between the two Koreas on July 27, 1953, during a tour of the Joint Security Area of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two countries.
He escaped from the airport
King, one of more than 28,000 soldiers in the US contingent in South Korea, was accompanied by military escorts to the airport, however, he managed to leave to then join a group heading for a tour of the Demilitarized Zone border. A man who participated in the same ride at ZDC told CBS that “a man laughed” and started running between buildings. “At first I thought it was a bad joke, but then I saw it wasn’t working and everyone was confused.”
He defected, and is now in detention in North Korea
Military sources confirmed to the media, “It was a deliberate decision by the army to cross the border.” “We believe he is currently in the custody of the North Korean authorities and we are working with our military counterparts in Pyongyang to resolve this incident,” the United Nations said in a statement.
ZDC has snipers and mines everywhere
The Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas is one of the most heavily fortified areas in the world, guarded by armed guards, surrounded by electric fences and barbed wire and riddled with landmines. But King isn’t the first American soldier to cross that line, he’s the fifth. Indeed, in the 1960s at least four American soldiers crossed the border into Pyongyang: James Joseph Dresnok, Jerry Parish, Larry Allen Upshier, and Charles Robert Jenkins.
Kiss him: actors in propaganda, married to kidnapped wives
All four were used by the North Korean regime as actors in propaganda cinema, as American “invaders”. The Pyongyang government also wanted them to marry, and with the tenderness that characterizes an oppressive regime, he thought well To kidnap his women in the West. Roman painter Doina Pompia, who lived in Rome, was tricked into North Korea and married off to Dresnok. The only person to return across the North Korean border was Jenkins, who married a Japanese Hitomi Suga, too, after years of being allowed to emigrate with his family in Japan. Once there he surrendered to US military justice, and managed to get away with a very light sentence. He died in the Land of the Rising Sun in 2017. A year before that, Dresnok, who ended his days in North Korea like the other three, in 1983 Absher died and in 98 Parish.
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