“He was taking out a mattress and bedding to garbage dumps on that morning, and it was strange because they were all too new,” a neighbour was quoted by Yonhap as saying. The man had little interaction with neighbours, and was seen throwing away his belongings a day before he crossed the border, Yonhap reported. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that police in the northern Seoul district of Nowon who provided safety protection and other care to the man had raised concerns in June over his possible return to the North.īut it said no action was taken due to a lack of concrete evidence.Īn official at Seoul’s Unification Ministry handling cross-border affairs said on Tuesday the returnee had received government support for personal safety, housing, medical treatment and employment. North Korean officials have not commented on the incident and state media have not reported it. South Korea’s military, which has come under fire for the border breach, has launched an inquiry into how the North Korean man had evaded guards despite being caught on surveillance cameras hours before crossing the border. The official dismissed concerns that the former defector could have been a spy, saying the man did not have a job that would give him access to sensitive information. NK News website also quoted a South Korean official saying the man “had a difficult life” in his new home. “I would say he was classified as lower class, barely scraping a living,” the official said, declining to elaborate citing privacy concerns.
The official said he was making a poor living while working as a janitor in the South Korean capital, Seoul. The news on Tuesday heightened fresh debate in South Korea over how such defectors are treated in the country and raised questions about whether they receive adequate support after making the dangerous journey from the impoverished, tightly controlled North to the wealthy, democratic South.Ī South Korean military official told the Reuters news agency that the defector who returned was a man in his 30s who had crossed into the country just over a year ago. The person who crossed South Korea’s heavily fortified border into North Korea last week was a defector from the North who had struggled in his new life, according to officials and media reports.
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