Nearly 40 years after he allegedly left his Army unit and defected to North Korea, Sergeant Charles Jenkins surrendered to US military authorities in Japan yesterday.
Looking frail but determined, Jenkins, accompanied by his Japanese wife and two North Korea-born daughters, stood at attention and saluted as he was received by military police at the gate of this base just south of Tokyo.
"Sir, I'm Sergeant Jenkins and I'm reporting," he said.
"You are now under the control of the US Army," Lieutenant Colonel Paul Nigara told him in response.
Army officials said Jenkins, now 64, would be put back on active duty, issued an ID card and given a uniform and haircut pending legal action.
His reprocessing back into the Army was expected to take a week or so.
No date has yet been determined for his court martial, which was expected to be held in Camp Zama. The court martial was expected to take five or six days.
He'll be treated with dignity and fairness, said Army spokesman Major John Amberg.
Jenkins is charged with defecting to the North, where he lived for 39 years, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. While in the North, he made propaganda broadcasts, played devilish Americans in anti-US films and taught English at a school for spies.
The North Carolina native is widely expected to strike a plea bargain with military authorities to avert imprisonment. He has met several times in recent weeks with an Army-appointed attorney to prepare his case.
The attorney also accompanied Jenkins to Camp Zama yesterday.
"I expect we have a lot more to face in the days to come," Jenkins' wife, Hitomi Soga, said as she left a Tokyo hotel where Jenkins had been under medical care since July.
"But we hope that the four of us can live together as soon as possible," she said.
Jenkins' fate has become the focus of intense interest in Japan because of Soga, who was one of more than a dozen Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s and taken to North Korea.
She and Jenkins met soon after she arrived in the North in 1978. Soga was allowed to return to Japan after a historic Japan-North Korea summit in Pyongyang in 2002, but Jenkins and the couple's daughters remained in the North until this summer.
Soga's plight has inspired widespread sympathy here. Tokyo arranged a reunion of the family in Indonesia in July, and then convinced Jenkins to come to Japan for treatment for ailments linked to an operation he had in North Korea.
Jenkins has not addressed the charges against him.
RSS