l 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.
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