South Korea yesterday rejected Pyongyang’s demand to return 11 refugees from North Korea after confirming their desire to defect, officials in Seoul said.
Pyongyang sent a message through a cross-border military hotline demanding South Korea send all the refugees back to their homeland, the South’s unification ministry said, but Seoul sent a reply yesterday saying the defectors had clearly expressed their wish to stay in South Korea.
“Our government will not accept the North’s demand,” a ministry spokesman told reporters.
The South Korean coastguard has questioned the defectors, six of who are women, since they arrived aboard a wooden boat off the east coast on Friday.
Investigators found the boat left the North’s northeastern port of Kimchaek on Sept. 27 and sailed as far as 250km southeast into international waters to avoid the North’s radar, Yonhap news agency said.
An unidentified government official told Yonhap the boat departed the port late at night under the guise of a fishing boat.
“It sailed as far from the coast as possible not to be caught by the North Korean military radar and then turned toward [South Korean] waters,” the official said.
Two women said they boarded the boat by accident, while nine are family members who told investigators that they had prepared the defection for about one year, Yonhap said.
It was the first case in seven years of a large-scale defection of North Koreans to the South by sea.
Almost 17,000 North Koreans, fleeing hunger or repression in the hardline North, have arrived in the South since the end of the 1950-1953 conflict. The vast majority have arrived in recent years.
Sea escapes are relatively rare, with most fugitives crossing the land border to China and traveling to Southeast Asian nations before resettling in South Korea, but in June last year there were six separate escapes from the North by sea.
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