A South Korean student said he planned to be arrested in North Korea as a ploy to build diplomatic ties between his home country and its reclusive neighbor.
Joo Won-moon, a 21-year-old New York University student, smiled often and appeared relaxed in a CNN interview monitored closely by North Korean officials this week. He said he illegally crossed into the heavily militarized dictatorship by hiking across the Great Wall from China then crawling through two barbed wire fences before he was captured by North Korean soldiers.
"I thought that by my entrance -- illegally, I acknoweldge -- but I thought that some great event could happen and hopefully that event could have a good effect on the relations between north and south." Joo told CNN.
North Korean authorities detained Joo on April 22, according to state media, but Joo said he has not been told what specific charges he faces.
He said he is being held in a room with three beds and a private bathroom where he has been well-fed and healthy. He has no access to phones or Internet, and the CNN interview marked his first communication with anyone outside of the country.
"I understand my parents and my loved ones are worrying a lot about me," Joo told CNN reporter Will Ripley. "But I would like to say that I'm well and there's no need to worry because the people here have treated me to the best of humanitarian treatment." Riply said Won told him he "wanted to be arrested."
Joo took a semester off of NYU's Stern School of Business to take a cross-country trip from New Jersey to California, according to CNN. When he was unable to find any work in California, he hatched the plan to travel to North Korea. An NYU spokesperson told the
"I hope that I will be able to tell the world how an ordinary college student entered the DPRK illegally, but however with the generous treatment of the DPRK, that I will be able to return home safely," Joo said.
North Korea has detained a number of Americans, South Koreans and other foreigners in the past, often under charges of espionage. Last year, the country imprisoned U.S. citizen Jeffrey Fowle for six months after he left a Bible in a nightclub. Another American citizen, Kenneth Bae, was sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp for planning a “religious coup d'état.” They were both released in 2014.