North Korea’s military said yesterday that four South Korean fishermen seized a day earlier after their boat strayed into North Korean waters remained under investigation, government officials in Seoul said.
The 26-tonne boat drifted north on Thursday after the satellite navigation system apparently malfunctioned. North Korean soldiers towed the vessel to the eastern port of Jangjon, just north of the border, South Korean officials said.
North Korea’s military said in a written message to the South that “the issue of crew members and the vessel will be dealt with according to the outcome of the investigation,” the Unification Ministry in Seoul said.
Some analysts said the North could use the fishermen to exert pressure on Seoul amid badly strained ties between the two Koreas, which technically remain at war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce in 1953, not a peace treaty.
Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said he viewed the North’s quick reaction as positive but was cautious, saying he would wait and see how things would play out, his spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said.
“I hope that my husband and three other crew members will quickly return home along with their boat,” Lee Ah-na, the wife of the boat’s skipper Park Kwang-sun, said from the eastern port of Geojin, just south of the border.
Maritime incidents involving fishing boats and other commercial vessels occur from time to time. While most are resolved amicably, two skirmishes involving military ships twice have sparked deadly naval battles, in 1999 and 2002.
North Korea, censured by the U.N. Security Council for a spate of nuclear and missile tests his year, has custody of a South Korean employee of the two Koreas’ joint industrial park in the border town of Kaesong, in addition to two American journalists sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor.
Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung called on Pyongyang to quickly return the fishermen and their boat on humanitarian grounds, citing Seoul’s fast repatriation of North Korean fishing boats that have drifted into its waters in recent years.
North Korean officials have provided no word on the fishermen’s condition, or any other details, the ministry said.
South Korea allowed a North Korean patrol vessel to tow away a North Korean fishing boat that crossed into the countries’ disputed western maritime border on Thursday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
“In similar cases in the past, the North returned fishermen after four to five days of investigation,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies.
“But considering the current tension between the two sides, it is possible for the North to hold them much longer, citing its investigation,” Yang said.
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