The provincial party committee of South Hwanghae Province and security forces are reportedly seething after it was belatedly learned that four people and a wooden boat disappeared in the waters off Ryongyon County.
A source in South Hwanghae Province told Daily NK on Thursday that the provincial party locked down Ryongyon County’s Monggumpo Beach after belatedly learning that three members of the family of a “security guidance officer” of the beach’s management office and a discharged soldier disappeared with a boat.
According to the source, the beach’s management office had decided to clear garbage floating in the sea using wooden boats and borrowed three such boats with the permission of relevant government organizations. However, all the boats disappeared prior to the work commencing.
The office felt something was off about all the borrowed boats disappearing and reported the situation to the county branches of the Ministry of Social Security and Ministry of State Security. The ministries reportedly determined that the security guidance officer’s family and a discharged soldier staying in their home had disappeared and belatedly began asking about their whereabouts.
Believing the individuals had used the boats to defect to South Korea, the Ministry of State Security learned during its investigation that the person who had shown the most interest in clearing the garbage in the water was the security guidance officer, and that he was the one who took the lead in borrowing the boats.
The Ministry of State Security belatedly searched the nearby waters, but in the end they could not find the disappeared individuals. In the meantime, they discovered two of the wooden boats floating with their mooring lines untied near a distant breakwater, pushed there by the waves.
The source said the ministry guessed that the three boats borrowed by the beach management office to clear garbage had been tied together at first, but the escapees had taken one of the boats to flee and the remaining two had floated off to the breakwater with their moorings untied.
“The South Hwanghae Province party committee first put Monggumpo Beach under lockdown, worried that it would become a major problem when the higher-ups learned of the escape,” said the source. “They’ve silenced everyone who knows so that rumors don’t get out.”
“The Ryongyon County Party [Committee], Ministry of State Security and Ministry of Social Security are telling locals that the individuals died in a fishing accident as they quietly conduct investigations into the security guidance officer’s family and discharged soldier,” he added. “Recently, they’ve also decided to order strengthened controls, organizing ideological reviews of security officials and handing out warnings to the public.”
