Mick Hartley

Back to the intriguingly murky saga of the supposed South Korean defector who was shot dead in the water by a North Korean patrol boat, then doused in fuel and burned.

A key element of the claim that the man wanted to defect, as put forward by the South Korean government, was that he'd left his shoes neatly placed on the deck of the ship where he served as a fisheries officer. That was a clear indication, so it was claimed, that the man leapt overboard willingly. But these shoes, it turns out, were slippers – not his working shoes:

The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries said the same day, "It is unlikely that he accidentally lost his footing judging by how neatly he had placed his shoes." The ministry even published a picture of the slippers stashed amid a pile of ropes.

But his colleagues said it is absurd to think that he shuffled around on board in a pair of slippers. "The ship is our office, and no one goes to work wearing a pair of slippers," one crewmember said.

Crew said fisheries officials normally wear boots to protect their feet from falling objects if the ship pitches violently. The slain official was on night duty from midnight until 4 a.m. but no other shoes that belonged to him were found on the ship.

"On Sept. 27, the Korea Coast Guard collected all of the official's belongings that were stored onboard, but I was briefed by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries that there were no shoes found that he wore when he boarded," Hong said.  […]

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Suh Wook admitted in a National Assembly audit on Wednesday that South Korea could have sent an SOS to North Korea through an international communication network of commercial vessels to rescue the official. But Suh added that there were "risks" to asking North Korea to rescue the official as it would reveal how it gathers intelligence and expose security assets.

Suh also admitted that he was briefed in the initial phase of the incident that there was "no possibility of a defection to North Korea." That suggests the government suspected that the official had fallen overboard accidentally but invented the defection story to cover its back.

The man was picked up in North Korean waters on the morning of Sept. 22 and apparently kept in the freezing water by his captors for another six hours before they shot him dead, doused the body in fuel and incinerated it.

President Moon Jae-in then sat on the story for two days until he had safely delivered a pre-recoded speech to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly in which he proposed a peace treaty with North Korea.

When I first reported the story I mentioned that the man was defecting because he was recently divorced, and because of huge debts he'd run up. I've seen no further mention of this, which suggests that perhaps these were claims that the South Korean authorities made up to try and explain the deeply unlikely idea that a man would willingly defect to the North – never mind defect by jumping into the freezing sea to try and swim across into North Korean waters.

His family, meanwhile, are fighting back.