By Alexander Smith - NBC News
The United Nations has entered talks with North Korea over the U.S. soldier who fled across the heavily militarized border into the country led by Kim Jong-Un last week, a senior U.N. official announced Monday.
Private Second Class Travis King, 23, was about to fly back to the United States from South Korea for possible disciplinary action after refusing to pay a fine for allegedly damaging public property.
He escaped his military escort at the airport last week and managed to join a guided tour of the Joint Security Area, a piece of land between North Korea and its southern neighbor that is administered by the UN.
[Witnesses tell how U.S. soldier crossed border into North Korea: "Everyone was stunned"]
Although the North Koreans said nothing public about King, the U.N. force handling negotiations between the two Koreas said it was in talks with the North about the fugitive soldier.
"The main concern for us is the welfare of Private King," said Lt. Gen. Andrew Harrison, a British Army officer who serves as deputy commander of the United Nations Command, known as UNC.
At a news conference in Seoul, Harrison said the dialogue was taking place through a mechanism established following the North-South armistice, which was signed in 1953 to stop fighting in the Korean War.
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"I can't say anything that could harm that process. A lot of this remains unknown," Harrison said.
Asked by NBC News, sister network of Noticias Telemundo, if King was being treated as a deserter, Harrison said, "We have not characterized King as anything other than an American soldier at this time."
Last week, Defense Department spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the U.S. had received no response when asked about King's whereabouts and well-being. The United States has no embassy-level relations with North Korea, but sent the message through Swedish officials, its usual solution.
[North Korea is silent about U.S. soldier who crossed its border]
The incident provides another point of tension between the West and North Korea, a repressive nuclear-armed state that shares a complicated alliance and trade relationship with China.
North Korea says it fears Western-backed regime change and has repeatedly threatened to launch a nuclear strike to prevent it. The United States and its allies say the world cannot live with this threat and have vowed to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.
North Korea fired several rounds of cruise missiles into the Yellow Sea on Saturday, an apparent protest against the deployment of a U.S. nuclear submarine to South Korea.
In an April meeting between President Joe Biden and his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden warned that "a North Korean nuclear attack on the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of any regime that takes such action."