Gunfire, cars being thrown at breakneck speed, sprints in minefields: Forced crossings of the border between the two Koreas are extremely dangerous and remain the exception. Still, an American soldier ventured there this week.
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The border between the two Koreas is extremely secure. But in the village of Panmunjom, which forms the Joint Security Zone (JSA), the border is marked only by a modest concrete barrier that is relatively easy to cross, despite the presence of soldiers on both sides.
AFP takes stock of the most notorious defector cases:
American soldier
US Private 2nd Class Travis King was visiting Panmunjom with a group of tourists when he ran and yelled “ha ha ha” before heading to the north side, witnesses said.
He committed the crime “intentionally and without permission,” US officials said.
Mr King had just been released from a South Korean prison on July 10, where he had been serving a two-month sentence for assault.
According to the Yonhap News Agency, he is also suspected of “repeatedly kicking the back door of a police patrol car in the Mapo district of Seoul” last October and insulting the police who tried to arrest him.
North Korean soldier
In 2017, a North Korean private soldier undertook an extraordinary and spectacular raid.
Oh Chong Song, 24, drove a vehicle at breakneck speed across the Panmunjom border, under a hail of North Korean bullets, before taking cover behind a building in South Korea. Suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, he had to undergo multiple surgeries.
Mr. Oh later explained that he grew up listening to southern music, whose culture made him dream.
Soviet student
In 1984, Vasily Yakovlevich Matusok from the Moscow Institute of International Relations, where future diplomats and intelligence officers are trained, sprinted across the border.
His insane push sparked a 30-minute gun battle between the two sides that left three North Koreans and one South Korean dead. This defection remains one of the bloodiest events in JSA history.
Mr. Matuzok, who was not injured, later told US officials that he took the first opportunity to flee to the West.
North Korean journalist
In 1967, Lee Soo Keun, then vice president of North Korea’s official Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was covering talks between North Korea and the United Nations Command when he secretly asked US officials for help with his defection.
This apostasy was largely exploited by Southern propaganda, which welcomed him like a hero, offering him a house and a car, among other things.
The Seoul government even helped Mr. Lee, a married father of three in the north, marry an American lecturer in his new country, where he went on anti-Communist lecture tours.
But two years later, unhappy with his life in the South, Mr. Lee was arrested trying to flee with a fake passport, a wig and a fake mustache.
He was soon convicted and hanged for spying for the North. In 2018, a Seoul court posthumously pardoned him, ruling that he was wrongly executed on trumped-up charges.
American soldier
In 1962, a 21-year-old American soldier, James Joseph Dresnok, crossed the border into North Korea after running through a minefield to reach the border village of Kijong-dong. At that time, the young divorcee risked a court-martial.
He was content with his life in Pyongyang and said he would not leave that country, not even “for a billion dollars in gold”.
During his life in the north, Dresnok became the country’s movie star, often impersonating American villains.
In 2017, his two sons, wearing Korean People’s Army uniforms, confirmed their father’s death in a video interview released on a propaganda website.