Seoul, Aug 5 (IANS) Pyeongyang has yet to respond to Seoul’s move to hand over the body of a North Korean national found in South Korea last month to the North via the truce village of Panmunjom, Seoul’s unification ministry said on Tuesday.
The ministry earlier called on North Korea to respond to Seoul’s bid to transfer the body of a presumed North Korean man by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. The body was found on the shore of Seongmodo, a South Korean island in the Yellow Sea, in late June, with his belongings.
The ministry said it will wait for the North’s response until the proposed deadline, reports Yonhap news agency.
“If there is no response by then, the body will be classified as unclaimed and a funeral will take place (after cremation) in cooperation with a related provincial government,” a ministry official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
A total of 29 bodies of what are presumed to be North Korean nationals have been found in South Korean territory since 2010. Of them, North Korea has not taken six bodies, including two in 2023. North Korea last brought home the body of its national found in the South in 2019.
North Korea remains unresponsive to the Lee Jae Myung administration’s overtures to resume dialogue and mend frayed inter-Korean ties.
Early in July, a North Korean man crossed the inter-Korean border into South Korea.
Later on July 31, he expressed his wish to defect to the South, the unification ministry said.
South Korean troops secured the man on the night of July 3 in the mid-western part of the Demilitarised Zone separating the two Koreas after he crossed the heavily fortified Demarcation Line.
“During its participation in a joint government information investigation (into the man), the ministry has confirmed his intention to defect,” a unification ministry official told reporters.
North Korean defectors are entitled to government support to resettle in South Korea, whose Constitution recognises the entire Korean Peninsula as its territory and all Koreans as its nationals.
–IANS
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