KOLKATA: A North Korean national was nabbed by Border Security Force (BSF) after illegally slipping into India through the porous Indo-Bangladesh international border in North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal.
The accused Jhung Ho, in his mid-30s, has been detained with a valid North Korean passport but without any valid visa to enter India. During the preliminary investigation, Jhung Ho has claimed that he had been working with a North Korean mining equipment making firm in Bangladesh for the past two years and wanted to see India but could not get a tourist visa.
“Initial questioning of the accused revealed that he wanted to visit Kolkata and other parts of India but tried the illegal way of entering India after facing difficulty in getting a tourist visa to India. He has been living in Bangladesh for the past two years from where he learned a few words of Bengali and English. He has a valid North Korean passport,” a senior BSF official told The New Indian Express.
BSF officials have handed him over to police officials at Swarupnagar police station who has summoned a translator to make sense of the Korean with a splatter of Bengali and English words that Jhung Ho is speaking in. The accused has been awarded police custody by the local court. Sources revealed that Jhung Ho has confessed to the police that he paid a hefty sum to a tout to be taken across the border.
“Counterparts across the border have confirmed that the accused indeed works at a managerial level position in a North Korean state-owned firm which has an office at the North Korean embassy in Dhaka. But he is unable to satisfy the investigators why he took this extreme step of entering India without patiently waiting for tourist visa,” a senior police official of North 24 Parganas district said.
The West Bengal government has contacted the Ministry of External Affairs to deal with this case.