Anchor: A U.S. Forces Korea serviceman made an unauthorized crossing into North Korea from the truce village of Panmunjeom on Tuesday. The private appears to have had brushes with the law while in South Korea.
Choi You Sun reports.

Report: A U.S. soldier crossed the inter-Korean border into North Korea while visiting the Joint Security Area on Tuesday.

At a press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. Forces Korea servicemember, identified by the U.S. Army as Private Second Class Travis King, had "willfully and without authorization" separated from the tour group and crossed the military demarcation line.

He said the U.S. government was closely monitoring and investigating the situation, while working to notify the soldier's next of kin.

Quoting an unnamed U.S. official, The New York Times reported the incident transpired after the soldier failed to board a plane back to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he was to face military discipline after serving time in a South Korean prison for assault.

He instead joined a tour of the Joint Security Area at the border between the two Koreas, but details on how he was able to do so have not been released.

The assault charge, it was later discovered, was not King’s first run-in with the law in South Korea. Local legal sources said on Wednesday that the Seoul Western District Court slapped fines of five million won, or around four-thousand U.S. dollars, earlier in the year for damaging public property.

A police car arrived at the site of a reported assault in Seoul's Mapo District in the early hours of October 8, 2022, where King was arrested after he kicked and destroyed the rear right-side door of the vehicle while refusing to respond to officers.

In a separate incident, King was charged last September after he assaulted a South Korean national at a club in Seoul's Mapo District during a fight, but the charges were dropped upon the victim's request.

Running in between some buildings into the North on Tuesday, the soldier was reportedly seen cackling as the tour guides failed to catch him before he was taken into custody by North Korean soldiers. It remains unclear if he intended to defect.
Choi You Sun, KBS World Radio News.