North Korea’s Korean Central Broadcasting Station says a South Korean man voluntarily crossed the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to defect to North Korea on Monday.

A military official in Seoul said Wednesday that the military found a barbed-wire fence cut open in the zone controlled by the Army’s 22nd division in the eastern part of the DMZ.

The South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it is still in the process of determining whether the cut fence is linked to the South Korean man’s defection.

The JCS has confirmed that the South Korean, identified as Kang Dong-lim, served in South Korea’s 22nd Army division from September 2001 to November 2003.

The last time a South Korean defected to the communist state by way of cutting through the DMZ barbed-wire fence was in October 2004.