Some escapees pay bribes, cross rivers, risk lives to return to Kim Jong Un's North Korea
SEOUL, South Korea — Not long after nightfall on New Year's Day, a short, slight man picked a spot along one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world, a quarter-mile from the nearest platoon of soldiers, and scaled a 10-foot-tall wire fence.
Warning lights flashed and an alarm blared. The man hurried over rough terrain dusted with snow, navigating the threat of untold land mines left over from a last-century war, his movements slipping in and out of view of thermal cameras.
By midnight, he'd made it across the 2.5-mile Demilitarized Zone. He was back home — in North Korea.
Hours later, South Korean soldiers, who discounted the evening's disturbance as a false alarm, would realize they'd missed the man's footprints and the wisps of down feathers from his winter jacket clinging to the concertina wire atop the border
