US Man Arrested for Trying to Swim to North Korea to Meet Kim Jong Un
A U.S. man was arrested after he was caught trying to swim across a river from South Korea into North Korea Tuesday night in a bid to meet North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong Un, officials in the South's Defence Ministry said Wednesday.
"I was trying to go to North Korea in order to meet with supreme leader Kim Jong-un," the man told his interrogators, Yonhap News Agency quoted a government source.
Three U.S. citizens are currently jailed or waiting for their trial in North Korea. In fact, The State Department of the United States has warned Americans not to travel to North Korea - which is considered to be a deeply isolated nation, which has also threatened of launching nuclear strikes against the United States, USA Today reports.
The man, in his early 30s, was found lying on the banks of the Han River by the South Korean Marines just before midnight Tuesday, The Washington Post reports. The Han River runs through Seoul, but it forms a border with North Korea along its western stretch.
The U.S. man is being interrogated by the Southern Intelligence officials, a Defence Ministry spokesman said, who refrained from providing any further details.
Such attempts to cross the heavily-militarised border are very rare and tremendously dangerous.
In one such instance, a South Korean man - who was trying to swim to the North across the Imjin River side of the border - was shot dead by South Korean troops of a nearby guard post, in September 2013.
The latest incident is similar to the case of another American named Evan Hunziker, who swam across the Yalu river from China to North Korea in 1996, The Guardian reports.
