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SEOUL, South Korea – It is the most fortified border in the world.
The 2.5 mile demilitarized zone separating South Korea and North Korea is guarded by tall barbed wire fences, minefields, sensors and nearly two million troops on both sides.
But a man managed to get through because of loose screws.
When the North Korean man, a 20-year-old former gymnast, crawled over the fence on the southern edge of the DMZ this month, he passed sensors to set off alarms to alert South Korean guards.
It was the South Korean military’s most embarrassing border security breach in years. This raised a troubling question: How could the man have defected without being detected?
This week, the South Korean military said it had solved the mystery: the sensors had loose screws which caused the system to malfunction. There was no indication that the screws had been deliberately tampered with.
The sensors, installed on the fence in 2015, did not set off alarms as they were supposed to when they detected signs of intrusion, military investigators told South Korean reporters during a briefing near the venue on Wednesday.
After the discovery, South Korean officials began checking all sensors along the 255-mile border with the north.
Southern border guards first found signs on November 3 that an intruder from the north had crawled over the barbed wire fence in the eastern sector of the border. The military units went on alert, starting a vast manhunt.
By the time the North Korean was captured without incident the next day, he was 800 meters south of the fence. He told South Korean officials he wanted to defect. Officials have not disclosed other details, such as his name or the reason for his defection.
Defects in DMZ are relatively rare and dangerous. When someone from the North crosses the land border undetected, it raises questions about national security in South Korea. The two Koreas have remained technically at war since the Korean conflict of 1950-53 was interrupted by a difficult truce.
More than 33,000 people from North Korea have defected to South Korea since a devastating famine hit the North in the 1990s. But most have made it through China, which borders the North, and eventually go to a South Korean embassy in another country.
In November 2017, a North Korean soldier rushed through a hail of bullets fired by his comrades to enter the south through Panmunjom, the so-called Truce Village that straddles the border.
South Korea has installed the sensors along the border as part of its efforts to tighten security after another embarrassing breach at the border.
In 2012, a defected North Korean soldier not only climbed barbed wire along the border undetected, but had to knock on the doors of the southern soldiers barracks to attract attention.
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