South Korea Said Defector Did Not Have COVID-19

It doesn’t matter if he had COVID-19 or not, the Kim regime is clearly using him for domestic propaganda to discourage defectors by claiming South Korea is filled with people running around with coronavirus:

Last week, a 24-year-old defector returned to North Korea the way he left in 2017, authorities say, but with a coronavirus pandemic raging in the background this time, his illicit trip drew far more attention.

South Korea has identified the man only by his surname, Kim, and said he was the “runaway” who North Korea accuses of illegally crossing their shared border last week with symptoms of COVID-19.

Facing a sexual assault investigation, Kim evaded high-tech South Korean border control systems by crawling through a drain pipe and swimming across the Han River to the North on July 19, the South Korean military has said. He appears to have spent several days there before being caught.

South Korean military chief Park Han-ki told parliament on Tuesday that Kim, who is 163 cm (5.35 ft) tall and weighs 54 kg (119 lb), cut his way through barbed wire fences installed at the end of the pipe leading to the river.

A Seoul official told Reuters that Kim is believed to have taken a similar path when he defected to the South in 2017, and authorities say he scoped out the area earlier in July, apparently in preparation.

Kim’s story as a defector begins and, so far, ends in the city of Kaesong, a North Korean border town that hosted a now-shuttered inter-Korean factory park and liaison office.

When that industrial project was shut down amid rising tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme in 2016, the economic shock prompted Kim to try his luck in the South in 2017, he said in a YouTube video filmed with a fellow defector in South Korea in June.

Reuters

You can read more at the link, but this defector had $16k in debt he piled up and the job he was pursuing dried up because the pandemic. It is kind of ironic he left Kaesong for economic reasons to end up in a financial straits in South Korea as well. The real reason though he defected appears to be the fact an arrest warrant was issued for a sexual assault he is accused of committing. Hopefully someone tells Kim Jong-un to make sure they keep this guy on the other side of the border this time because he clearly is a scumbag.