SEOUL, South Korea — More details emerged Thursday about the last months in South Korea of a U.S. soldier who fled across the border to North Korea, as the isolated Communist country remained silent on his status.
Pvt. 2nd Class Travis King, 23, spent 48 days in a prison in Cheonan, a city about 50 miles south of the South Korean capital, Seoul, after he failed to pay a $4,000 fine on charges that included damaging public property, a South Korean government official told NBC News by phone on Thursday.
According to legal documents, King did not cooperate when apprehended by officers during the incident last October and caused hundreds of dollars in damage to a police patrol car while shouting profanities about Koreans and the Korean army.
“Each day Mr. King spent at the penitentiary was equivalent to about 100,000 won,” or about $80, said the official, who was not authorized to speak to the news media.
The incident threatened to worsen tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, a repressive and insular nuclear-armed nation still technically at war with the South. America does not have an embassy in North Korea, complicating any potential negotiations over King’s return.
King, who was released on July 10, had been escorted by the military to Incheon International Airport outside Seoul, the capital, on Tuesday for possible further disciplinary action in the United States.
Instead, he ended up on a group tour of the Joint Security Area on the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea, where he bolted across to the North to the shock of the tourists around him.
An airport official told NBC News on Thursday that King went to his gate but was missing a travel document needed to board the plane and was escorted out by an American Airlines employee.
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An American Airlines source familiar with the situation confirmed that King was escorted from the departure gate.
King’s relatives told NBC News on Wednesday that he had been grieving the death of his young cousin and acting unlike himself.
“It’s out of his character,” his uncle Myron Gates said. “I’ve never seen him get down like that, ever.”
King is the first known American to be detained in North Korea in nearly five years.
The U.S. has about 28,000 troops stationed in the South, a treaty ally that has remained frozen in conflict with the North since the Korean War ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty 70 years ago this month.
Jay Blackman, Andrea Mitchell and Megan Lebowitz contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
