US soldier Travis King has returned to the US after being freed by North Korea, a US Department of Defense official said yesterday.
“I can confirm that he has landed in the US,” the official said, without providing further details.
A US official previously said King would be taken to the Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas upon his return to the US — the same place where US basketball star Brittney Griner was evaluated after being released by Russia.
Photo: AP
After a drunken pub fight, an incident with police and a stay in South Korean jail, Private Second Class King was being taken to the airport in July to fly back to Texas. However, instead of traveling to Fort Bliss for disciplinary hearings, he snuck away, joined a Demilitarized Zone sightseeing trip and slipped over the border.
Last month, Pyongyang confirmed it was holding him, saying that King had defected to North Korea to escape “mistreatment and racial discrimination in the US Army.”
However, after completing its investigation, Pyongyang has “decided to expel Travis King, a soldier of the US Army who illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK, under the law of the Republic,” the Korean Central News Agency said on Wednesday, using the North’s formal acronym.
King’s border crossing came as relations between the two Koreas were at one of their lowest points ever, with diplomacy stalled and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un calling for increased weapons development, including tactical nuclear warheads.
One of the last US citizens to be detained by the North was student Otto Warmbier, who was held for a year and a half before being released in a coma to the US. He died six days later. About half a dozen US soldiers made rare defections to the North after the Korean War and were used for Pyongyang’s propaganda.
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