The North Korean soldier whose defection last week across the heavily armed border revealed serious problems with South Korea's border defense turned himself in at the barracks of a front-line unit after his knock at the entrance of another unit went unanswered, a top military official said.
The fresh revelations mean the defector wandered around inside South Korea longer than initially thought while looking for a place to surrender, after slipping across the border undetected in what is considered one of the biggest border security failures in South Korea in years.
The military has already been under fire for failing to detect the Oct. 2 crossing, especially as he was only taken into custody after he knocked on the entrance to a front-line unit on the eastern section of the border.
Gen. Jung Seung-jo, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a parliamentary audit of the military Thursday that the defector showed up at the barracks after he "got no response when he knocked on the door" at a nearby unit some 30 meters away.
According to the JCS chairman, the North Korean soldier left his unit about 50 kilometers north of the border around 4 a.m. on Sept. 29 before arriving at the border around 8 p.m. on Oct. 2. He then crossed the Demilitarized Zone, a 4-kilometer buffer zone between the two sides, and reached the South Korean border fence around 10:30 p.m.
He slipped past the South's border fence before turning himself in around 11 p.m.
"I feel sorry for causing confusion with the wrong account of what happened," the general told lawmakers. "We will take follow-up measures based on the outcome of a JCS team's investigation."
The military originally announced that the North Korean soldier was spotted on a surveillance camera and was taken into custody after he expressed his desire to defect. The JCS team's investigation later found the military was unaware of the defector's presence until he appeared at the unit.
The absence of surveillance camera footage from the time has also spurred speculation the military might have deleted it in an attempt to cover up the mistake. Officials later said the camera was malfunctioning at the time.
Officials also said the initial account of what happened was incorrect because a noncommissioned officer at the unit reported details of the incident based on his "assumption."
The report was later corrected, but a JCS officer ignored the corrected report, officials said.
Though defection across the border is considered rare, two other soldiers from the communist nation have made their way across the heavily armed border this year alone.
Just four days after the Oct. 2 defection, an 18-year-old solider defected Saturday after reportedly shooting two of his officers to death. Earlier, a third North Korean soldier crossed the land border into the South on Aug. 17, waving a white flag, an international symbol of capitulation.
The two Koreas remain technically at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. (Yonhap)