A soldier with the Supreme Guard Command who deserted his post near North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s ultra-luxurious Chamosan Villa in early January was recently captured by the authorities, Daily NK has learned.
According to a Daily NK source in North Korea last Thursday, a plain-clothed arrest squad from the Supreme Guard Command’s security department arrested the 19-year-old private — identified by his family name of Ri — in front of a soup stall near the Baesan-dong Market in Pyongyang’s Unjong District late in the evening of Jan. 4.
While being interrogated by the Supreme Guard Command’s security department, Ri said he had been planning to live as a wandering beggar, or kkotjebi, at markets in Pyongyang’s Unjong District, near where he was based as a soldier in Pyongsong. Ri believed that if he returned to his hometown, he would be immediately arrested.
As for why he deserted, Ri said he “missed sleep so much” that he was willing to become a kkotjebi if it meant getting a good night’s sleep.
“I ran, prepared for a dishonorable discharge, because I didn’t want to live any longer as a laundry soldier or a replacement patrol soldier,” he said.
The Supreme Guard Command’s security department called in the owner of the soup stall who let Ri stay at the shop in exchange for doing odd jobs like replacing briquettes to learn about how the soldier lived after he deserted.
The owner testified that the soldier handed over a military uniform and combat boots, asking the owner to sell them and help him for a couple of days.
When the owner pointed out that they were military items and asked where he got them from, the soldier said he was a vagabond and had stolen them from a soldiers’ barracks.
“He asked me to help him just for a couple of days, saying he wouldn’t ask me to hide him for free,” the owner told the investigators, according to the source. “I believed him, and fed and sheltered him for about a week, a period equal to value of the military items. I didn’t think he was a Supreme Guard Command soldier.”
Ri testified that he tossed away the automatic rifle, magazine and blank shells on a hillside near his patrol zone.
Ri’s unit – the 81st Brigade – searched for the weapon and shells, but has yet to find it, the source told Daily NK.
The Supreme Guard Command is treating the loss of the weapons as a direct threat to the personal safety of Kim Jong Un and putting everything into the search given that the incident involved the supreme leader’s villa.
The source said rumors that a soldier with the Supreme Guard Command survived for a few days as a beggar in a market by replacing briquettes at a soup stall immediately spread via the merchants of Baesan Market.
“The Supreme Guard Command’s security department immediately moved to keep the merchants quiet through the South Pyongan Province branch of the Ministry of State Security, and has mobilized government agencies, neighborhood watch units and agents of market security departments to look for the missing weapon and shells,” he said.
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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