What We Know About US Soldier Who Fled to North Korea
A North Korean flag flies at a military check point, from the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in Paju, South Korea.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/BloombergAbout 20 Americans have been detained by North Korea since the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, including the US soldier who in July ran across the border in the truce village set up to help forge the armistice. There has never been an easy way for Washington to win their return. The two countries have no direct diplomatic ties and have been adversaries for decades. Pyongyang often uses detained Americans — the last case was about five years ago — as political pawns and seeks maximum concessions for their release. In this case, however, it looks like he will be quickly expelled.
The Army identified him as Private Second Class Travis King, 23, a cavalry scout from Wisconsin who’d been in the Army since January 2021. He’d been jailed for nearly two months in South Korea for assault and was set to fly to Texas, where he faced expulsion from the military. But instead he left the airport, joined a tour to the Joint Security Area in the Panmunjom truce village. That’s the only place on the peninsula where military personnel from the US and North Korea regularly can stand face-to-face on their respective side of the border — a concrete slab about as tall as a cigarette lighter. A person on the tour said the man gave a loud laugh and ran between some buildings that straddle the border. King’s mother, Claudine Gates, told ABC News that she spoke with her son a few days prior, when he told her he was returning to Fort Bliss in Texas, saying she could not imagine that her son would cross into North Korea.