U.S. man caught trying to swim to North Korea

10 years ago | Posted in: Latest Politics News | 620 Views

BEIJING – Three U.S. citizens are currently jailed or awaiting trial in North Korea. The U.S. State Department warns Americans not to travel to North Korea, a deeply isolated nation that has threatened nuclear strikes against the USA. But none of that appeared to dissuade a U.S. man who tried to swim there Tuesday night from South Korea.

The U.S. citizen, in his late 20s or early 30s, was arrested by South Korean marine sentries close to midnight Tuesday while swimming across the Han River in the Gimpo border area, reported Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, citing an un-named government source. He had been swimming north with the current, but grew tired and took a break on the shore where marines discovered him, said the Korea Herald newspaper.

During a post-arrest interrogation, the U.S. citizen of Arabic descent said “I was trying to go to North Korea in order to meet with supreme leader Kim Jong-un,” Yonhap reported Wednesday. State intelligence agents continue to question the man over his motives, the source told Yonhap.

The man was perhaps fortunate to be taken alive. Last September, South Korean border guards shot and killed a 47-year-old South Korean man they said was trying to swim to North Korea across the Imjin river in the western border area.

Previous attempts by Americans to break into North Korea usually involve the country’s less militarized northern border with China.

In 1996, a drunken dare motivated U.S. citizen Evan C. Hunziker, 26, to swim across the Yalu river that separates China and North Korea. Detained for three months, he was freed during a visit to Pyongyang by the then New Mexico congressman, Bill Richardson.

North Korea may be seeking a similar intervention by a U.S. political heavyweight to resolve the fate of three U.S. citizens who successfully entered the country and are being punished for what the secretive state calls “hostile acts”.

Pyongyang has a long history of attempting to use American detainees to win attention and concessions from Washington, which insists Pyongyang must give up its nuclear ambitions before relations can be normalized.

North Korea has rebuffed repeated U.S. efforts to send the U.S. envoy for North Korean human rights issues, Robert King, to Pyongyang to discuss the men’s fates.

The North Korean Supreme Court sentenced American Matthew Miller to six years’ hard labor Sunday for entering the country illegally and trying to commit espionage, according to the KCNA state news agency. Miller, 24, from Bakersfield, Califor

nia, had been held since entering the country April 10 as a tourist with a New Jersey-based tour company. Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, 45, is serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea, and U.S. tourist Jeffrey Fowle, 56, a street repairs worker from Miamisburg, Ohio, awaits trial for leaving a Bible at a seamen’s club in May.

source: usatoday

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