American held in South Korea after trying to swim across Han River to rival North
Man in his 30s told investigators he wanted to meet leader Kim Jong-un
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 17 September, 2014, 11:04pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 18 September, 2014, 2:02am
Agence France-Presse in Seoul
Han river in Seoul. Photo: AFP
South Korean soldiers detained a US citizen who was apparently trying to swim across the river border into rival North Korea, the South's defence ministry said.
"A male American citizen was arrested last night while attempting to swim across the river," a ministry spokesman said yesterday, adding that he had been handed over to authorities.
According to the Yonhap news agency, the man told investigators that he had wanted to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Nobody at the US embassy in Seoul was immediately available for comment.
A government source, cited by Yonhap, said a border patrol had found the man, in his early 30s, lying exhausted on the south bank of the Han River where it forms part of the western section of the North-South frontier.
Attempted crossings of the heavily militarised border are rare and extremely dangerous.
Last September, a South Korean man who tried to swim to the North across the Imjin River section of the border was shot dead by South Korean troops manning a nearby guard post.
The latest incident carries echoes of the case of another American, Evan Hunziker, who swam across the Yalu River from China to North Korea in 1996.
Naked and apparently drunk, Hunziker purportedly did the swim as the result of a dare with a friend he had been drinking with.
He was arrested in the North on espionage charges and detained for three months before his release was secured during a visit to Pyongyang by the then New Mexico congressman, Bill Richardson.
North Korea currently has three American citizens in detention - Kenneth Bae, Matthew Miller and Jeffrey Fowle.
On Sunday, Miller was sentenced to six years of hard labour for "hostile" acts against the regime, four months after he was arrested for allegedly ripping up his tourist visa at immigration.
Bae, a Korean-American described by Pyongyang as a militant evangelist, was sentenced last year to 15 years of hard labour for seeking to topple the North's regime.
