Breaking: N. Korea Seizes S. Korean Fishing Boat
Sounds like the boat, which carried a crew of four, strayed across the NLL when its GPS system malfunctioned:
The fishing boat, skippered by a man only identified by his last name, Park, departed from the port of Geojin on the eastern coast at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday and sailed past the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border, as far as 20 miles off the port of Jejin, he said.
Geojin is about 150km northeast of Seoul and 15km south of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Koreas, which remain technically at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, without a formal peace treaty.
“We are pushing for its release,” the official said, adding South Korean authorities have sent a message calling on North Korea to immediately return the ship “for humanitarian reasons.”North Korea has yet to respond, the official said. [Yonhap]
South Korea has asked for the release of the crew, but so far, the North Koreans haven’t said anything other than saying they’d look into the matter. According to Yonhap, this is the third time in four years that North Korea has seized a South Korean fishing boats. The other boats were all released within three to eighteen days of being seized.
Update: So, I guess the North Koreans do read the Chosun Ilbo. You’d think that by now, people would know better than to make that kind of prediction, especially about North Korea.