South Korean sergeant kills five soldiers before shoot-out with troops near school

A South Korean army sergeant who fled his unit on the border with North Korea after killing five fellow soldiers engaged in a shoot-out with troops chasing him yesterday.

His unit brought his parents to the scene, asking them to persuade their son to surrender.

South Korean news media reported an officer was hit in the arm by one of the bullets fired by the fugitive soldier. By yesterday evening, the shooting had apparently stopped, and before dusk, the military evacuated 540 people from three villages to nearby schools as it prepared for a possible shoot-out with the renegade sergeant. Media photos from the scene showed camouflaged soldiers training their rifles from the rooftops of a village and an army gunship prowling the sky.

The assailant, a 22-year-old sergeant – identified only by his family name, Yim – was returning to his barracks on Saturday evening after sentry duty on the border when he attacked fellow soldiers with a hand grenade and a K-2 standard army-issue rifle, military officials said.

Seven soldiers injured

All seven soldiers injured in the Saturday shootings were expected to live, Kim Min-seok, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defence, said yesterday. As the news spread on Saturday that Yim had fled with his rifle and ammunition, villagers near his unit at the north-eastern tip of South Korea were advised to stay indoors. Fully armed soldiers dug foxholes around their villages. Soldiers added roadblocks to prevent the fugitive soldier from reaching towns farther south.

They also tightened vigilance on the border for fear that he might attempt to defect to North Korea. Nine army battalions were mobilised for the manhunt, with military helicopters scanning forested hills along the frontier.

Yim was seen early yesterday afternoon, six miles from his unit, which is when the shoot-out ensued. The episode highlights the challenge South Korea faces in keeping a largely conscript military, which is on guard against North Korea. The two Koreas are technically at war after the three-year Korean War was halted in 1953 with a truce and not a peace treaty.

Most of the North and South’s armed forces are amassed near their 240km border. Called the demilitarised zone, the heavily fortified frontier stretches across rugged hills and is guarded by tall wire fences and minefields. Soldiers from the South who are posted there are on constant lookout for infiltrators and are exposed to propaganda broadcasts from the North.

Serving on the border is considered one of the most gruelling duties among South Korean conscripts, especially when tensions run high with North Korea, as they have in recent months, with Pyongyang and Seoul trading threats of attack and counterattack.

Ruled unfit

The military screens soldiers for their physical and mental fitness before assigning them to guard post duties on the border. Yim was ruled unfit in April last year but was cleared for border duty in a second test in November, said the South Korean national news agency Yonhap, quoting an unnamed military source. Kim, the ministry spokesman, said the army was interviewing fellow soldiers in Yim’s unit to determine the cause of his rampage.

The soldier was scheduled to be discharged in September after a mandatory 21-month service. The border shooting rocked South Korea, where many remain traumatised by the sinking of a ferry in April that left more than 300 people dead or missing.

In recent years, the South Korean military has come under harsh scrutiny for disciplinary problems. In 2005, a soldier killed eight colleagues in a front-line army unit. In 2011, a marine corporal bullied by other marines went on a shooting spree at a base near the tense maritime border with North Korea, killing four fellow soldiers.

In 2012, a North Korean soldier scaled three barbed-wire fences on the border but was not detected until he arrived at the South Korean barracks, saying he wanted to defect. – (New York Times service)