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A still from CCTV footage showing the individual who crossed into North Korea

“The military needs to be especially vigilant and accountable for the recurrence of this kind of situation,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday, referring to a recent incident in which someone managed to cross the border into North Korea.

“The failure of patrol operations in the area of the 22nd Infantry Division is a serious issue that must not be allowed to happen,” Moon said.

Blue House spokesperson Park Kyung-mee said that Moon had also given orders to “tackle problems with vigilance and related measures and the operation of our patrol system that came up in the field survey and carry out a special probe of vigilance throughout the military to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Military officials apologized Wednesday, admitting that the border crossing had revealed gaps in military vigilance.

“I would like to apologize to the public for the border crossing that occurred on the eastern front. We intend to take compensatory measures based on the results of our investigation,” said Jeon Dong-jin, a lieutenant general in the army and director of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

According to the interim results of the 22nd Infantry Division’s investigation into the border crossing, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff released on Wednesday, security cameras at a general outpost under the control of the division recorded five separate scenes of the man scrambling over the barbed wire fence, but soldiers monitoring the cameras failed to take notice.

When the man crossed a barbed wire fence at 6:36 pm, he tripped a sensor attached to the fence that caused warning lights to come on and a siren to sound. A platoon leader and five soldiers were dispatched to the scene but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. They failed to notice the man’s footprints in the snow around the fence or white down stuck to the top of the fence, apparently from the man’s jacket.

The unit that was dispatched to the fence then tried to replay footage from the surveillance cameras at the time the incident occurred. But the time displayed in the storage server didn’t match the actual time of the recording, which kept the unit from finding footage of the man crossing the barbed wire fence. Because of that four-minute gap, the soldiers didn’t see the footage and concluded that nothing was the matter.

It wasn’t until 9:17 pm that the unit in question detected the man inside the DMZ with a thermal observation device. But the general outpost commander waited to dispatch a search team, believing he was defecting to South Korea. The man headed north a little over 20 minutes later, at which point the military launched an operation to stop him. But at 10:49 pm, he crossed the Military Demarcation Line into North Korea.

By Kwon Hyuk-chul and Lee Wan, staff reporters

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