SEOUL, July 13 (Reuters) – The South Korean navy early on Monday morning recovered the body of a seaman who went missing at sea over the weekend near the maritime border with North Korea, the navy said in a statement.
The navy had been conducting a search and rescue operation after the seaman went missing from a patrol vessel that was operating off South Korea’s eastern coast and found him about 52 km (32 miles) east of the coast, it said.
It did not provide any circumstances surrounding his disappearance.
South Korea had asked North Korea for help and the possible return of the seaman if he had drifted across the so-called Northern Limit Line (NLL) maritime border.
The militaries of the two Koreas remain in a tense standoff along the sea and land border drawn up at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
In 2020, a fisheries ministry official drifted across the sea border after going missing from a patrol vessel off the west coast and was shot dead by North Korean soldiers.
North Korea later issued a rare apology over the incident. Ties between the two have turned sharply hostile in recent years and Pyongyang has cut off all lines of communication with the South.
(Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by Nia Williams and Christian Schmollinger)
