US soldier Travis King to plead guilty to desertion for bolting into North Korea
A US Army private who bolted across the border into North Korea will plead guilty at a military court to charges including desertion and disobeying an officer.
A US Army private who bolted across the border into North Korea will plead guilty at a military court to charges including desertion and disobeying an officer, his lawyer said in a statement.
Travis King will enter the plea at a general court martial, with a sentencing hearing set for Sept. 20, lawyer Franklin Rosenblatt said in a statement posted to social media. King, who is facing 14 offenses, will plead guilty to five of them, taking “responsibility for his conduct,” the lawyer said in the statement Monday.
There was no mention of what punishment King may face. Rosenblatt spoke to the Associated Press and declined to comment on a possible sentence.
King was a cavalry scout from Wisconsin who’d been in the Army since January 2021 before dashing across the border within the Demilitarized Zone on July 18, 2023.
Leading up to the incident he’d been jailed for nearly two months in South Korea for assault, and he was set to fly to Texas, where he faced expulsion from the military. Instead of boarding his plane, he left the airport and joined a civilian tour to the Joint Security Area in the Panmunjom truce village that straddles the border, where he broke away from the group and sprinted to North Korea’s portion of the village.
He was expelled from North Korea about two months later and flown back to the US. No concessions were given to North Korea in order to secure King’s release, according to a US official.
It’s unusual for North Korea to quickly expel a US service member seeking refuge there. The North Korean government has held such individuals in the past to extract concessions from the US. In some instances they were held for propaganda purposes, with a show trial and sometimes a confession likely designed by Pyongyang’s propaganda apparatus to tarnish the image of the US.
North Korea’s state media said King crossed into its territory because “he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the US Army.” His release after about two months likely indicates that Pyongyang didn’t see much value in keeping him.
King has been held in the Otero County Detention Center in New Mexico, which Fort Bliss, Texas, uses for its pre-trial detainees, according to the Military.com website.