South Korea has returned all three North Korea sailors aboard a fishing boat that crossed the inter-Korean maritime border over the weekend.  

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff(JCS) said the handover of the North Korean vessel and the sailors took place at the Northern Limit Line, the de facto maritime border between the two Koreas, in the East Sea at around 3:30 p.m. on Monday. 

The JCS said South Korean authorities found no suspicious points about their drifting into the South and respected the sailors’ wishes to return home. It concluded that the ship drifted into South Korean waters due to a navigation error, as the North Korean sailors claimed. 

Suspicions that they may have been North Korean spies was triggered partly by the fact that the captain of the boat was wearing clothes that looked like a military uniform. 

The JCS said the skipper’s claim that he made his clothes by himself using fabric his wife purchased from a North Korean market was convincing, and also confirmed that although the boat belongs to the North Korean military, none of the three sailors were soldiers. It added that registering boats with the military to share profits is a usual business practice for North Korean fishermen. 

The North Korean boat was spotted crossing the NLL at around 11:21 p.m. Saturday, prompting the military to immediately send a naval vessel to the scene. The three crew members and the boat were then brought to a South Korean military port in Yangyang, Gangwon Province, at around 5:30 a.m. Sunday for investigation.