After it was reported that four North Korean residents sailed in a small wooden boat to the sea near Sokcho, Gangwon Province, controversy arose over the military’s inadequate surveillance. The military authorities explained that they had detected and were already tracking signs of unusual activity.
A Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) official met with reporters on the 24th and said, “There were no particular misses, and the operation proceeded normally.”
This differs from the so-called ‘waiting for defection’ in June 2019, when a wooden boat carrying North Korean residents broke the sea and coastal boundaries without restrictions and crossed the Northern Limit Line (NLL) to enter Samcheok Port.
Starting at 4 a.m. that day, unusual signs were detected in the open sea north of the NLL through a naval ship’s radar, and maritime patrol aircraft P-3 and warships that urgently dispatched to the NLL area carried out a general search operation, according to an official.
The first to detect an unknown object (wooden boat) coming down diagonally towards the south and shared the situation with the navy.
Separately from the military operation, a fisherman fishing around 7:10 reported a strange boat’, and the coast guard was dispatched.
A military official explained, “There are countless targets in the sea, so there are physical limitations to dispatching when an unknown target comes, so we tracked it until it was confirmed,” and “The East Sea NLL is about 248.5 miles(400km) east-west, and it is quite difficult to capture small targets with a few warships.”
Meanwhile, it was reported that four North Korean residents, including one man and three women, entered the Sokcho area in Gangwon Province by a small wooden boat and expressed their intention to defect.
By. Kim Da Woon
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