Travis King: US probes if North Korea knew about defecting soldier as Army worried for his wellbeing

Travis King was detained on 8 October following an altercation. When police tried to question him, he behaved aggressively and didn’t reply to their queries. After he was placed in a patrol car, he shouted insults and expletives as he kicked the car door, with the ruling saying that he caused around 584,000 won in damage.

The court said that the defendant admitted to the allegations, that he didn’t have a criminal record, and that he paid 1 million won to repair the car.

Before fleeing the airport to join the tour group, Mr King had passed through security on his own.

The Korea Times reported that an airport official said that Mr King had said that his passport was missing as an excuse to not get on the flight.

One official told Reuters that DMZ tours are advertised at the airport and Mr King seemed to have joined one but it’s unclear how he managed to do so as they usually take three days to schedule because of security measures.

A tourist from New Zealand who was visiting the DMZ between North and South Korea thought it was a stunt when she saw a supposed member of her tour group sprint towards the north.

It quickly became clear that the incident was no prank, but instead a daring escape by a US soldier who had fled a Seoul airport and somehow joined the tour group as he was facing possible disciplinary measures at home.

Sarah Leslie told the AP that Travis King, 23, was out of uniform, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and she had no clue that he was a soldier, or in legal jeopardy.

Mr King, 23, had spent close to two months in a South Korean prison for assault before he was released on 10 July and was set to head back to Fort Bliss in Texas on Monday where he may have been discharged and possibly be the subject of further military discipline.

Ms Leslie told the news agency that her group went further than other tours as they visited the Joint Security Area in the village of Panmunjom, meaning that the tourists were essentially stepping onto North Korean soil in one of the buildings which is controlled jointly by the two nations.

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Sarah Leslie told the AP that to be part of the DMZ tour, they had to submit their passports and get permits ahead of time.

The group left Seoul early in the morning, with Ms Leslie noticing that Mr King was journeying alone and appeared unwilling to speak to others taking the tour. She also noted that he bought a DMZ hat from a gift shop.

The tour was nearing its end Tuesday afternoon — the group had just walked out of the building and were milling about taking photos — when she saw King running “really fast”.

“I assumed initially he had a mate filming him in some kind of really stupid prank or stunt, like a TikTok, the most stupid thing you could do,” Ms Leslie said. “But then I heard one of the soldiers shout, ‘Get that guy.’”

She said the order came from a US soldier, part of a group of troops patrolling the area alongside South Korean service members.

But the soldiers didn’t have time to respond. She said that after running about 10 metres (30 feet) down a narrow passageway between the distinctive blue buildings, Mr King was over the border and then disappeared from sight. It was all over in a few seconds.

Ms Leslie said she couldn’t see anyone on the North side – the group had been told earlier the North Koreans there had been lying low since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After Travis King ran, the soldiers hustled all the tourists into a building and then took them to an information centre to give statements, according to Sarah Leslie. She said many of the tourists, including her father, hadn’t seen Mr King run but a soldier explained the events to them.

“People couldn’t really quite believe what had happened,” Ms Leslie said. “Quite a few were really shocked. Once we got on the bus and got out of there we were all kind of staring at each other.”

Ms Leslie, a lawyer from New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, said she’d long had an interest in the Koreas after studying politics at university and seeing South Korean movies.

She said she found it hard to understand why Mr King would head to North Korea.

“I just didn’t think anyone would ever want to do that,” she said.

Panmunjom, a once-obscure farming village inside the DMZ that now hosts a “Joint Security Area,” is different. It’s a tourist site, albeit one of the world’s most surreal.

Seven decades of division since the end of the Korean War are made palpable by the South Korean soldiers who stand on guard, glaring across the border. North Korea soldiers are there, too, but less visible most days.

The Korean Peninsula was split at the end of World War II into a Soviet-controlled North and U.S.-backed South. It was in Panmunjom that U.S. and North Korean forces negotiated and eventually signed the 1953 truce that ended fighting in the Korean War and created the DMZ. There has never been a formal peace treaty, the village is formally administered by neither North or South Korea.

A carnival atmosphere can occasionally take hold in the area around Panmunjom, with souvenir shops, fast-food restaurants and throngs of tourists, though North Korea has been closed to tourism because of the pandemic since early 2020. The South Korean side has an amusement park not far from the village, and used to have a Popeyes chicken outlet.

Tours to the southern side reportedly drew around 100,000 visitors a year before the pandemic, when South Korea restricted gatherings to slow the spread of COVID. The tours resumed fully last year.

The area is also a throwback to the Cold War, a time of barely contained, simmering hostility between nuclear-armed rivals. There have been ax killings, U.S. bomber fly-bys and desperate defections along the border. U.S. presidents and senior officials regularly make the trip to the southern side of the DMZ for photo ops. The village is formally administered by neither North or South Korea.

The tourist area is a short drive from Seoul, which lies in easy artillery range of the estimated 70% of North Korea’s 1.2 million troop arrayed along the border.

The mother of the American soldier who illegally crossed into North Korea said she was “shocked” and just wanted him to return home.

Meanwhile, his uncle has said that he was “breaking down” following the death of his seven-year-old cousin.

Private 2nd Class Travis King, who is in his early 20s, crossed the heavily fortified inter-Korean border to enter North Korea where he is believed to be detained. The incident has threatened a new diplomatic row and a crisis with the nuclear-armed state.

His mother, Claudine Gates, who lives in Racine, Wisconsin, told ABC News that she heard from her son “a few days ago”.

“I can’t see Travis doing anything like that,” Ms Gates said, adding that she was taken aback when she was told her son had crossed into North Korea.

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There are occasional verbal exchanges between U.S. soldiers and their North Korean counterparts, often businesslike, at the Demarcation Line in the village.

It’s a thrill, perhaps, for the tourists, but it’s a dangerous proposition for the soldiers keeping watch, often only meters (feet) apart.

Months and years often pass without incident, but when something happens, it can be violent.

In 1976, North Korean soldiers axed two American army officers to death, and the United States responded by flying nuclear-capable B-52 bombers toward the DMZ in an attempt to intimidate the North.

In 1984, North Korean and U.N. Command soldiers traded shots when a Soviet citizen defected by sprinting to the southern side. Three North Korean soldiers and one South Korean soldier were killed.

In 2017, when a fleeing North Korean soldier crashed his jeep and then sprinted across the border, North Korean soldiers fired handguns and rifles before Southern soldiers could drag the wounded soldier to safety. South Korean soldiers didn’t return fire.

North Koreans who flee to South Korea — an estimated 30,000 since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War — have mostly used the more porous border between North Korea and China.

In 2019, during a period that saw unprecedented diplomacy between North Korea and the United States and South Korea, Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands at the borderline. Trump stepped over the concrete slab, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korean territory.

On Tuesday, Private 2nd Class Travis King, 23, became the first known American detained in the North in nearly five years, after he bolted across the border at Panmunjom.

King, who had served nearly two months in a South Korean prison, had been held on assault charges and was being sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, on Monday, where he could have faced additional military disciplinary actions and discharge from the service. But officials say that instead of getting on the plane, he left the airport and later joined a tour of Panmunjom.