Parents plead for runaway shooting suspect to hand himself in

The parents of a runaway South Korean soldier who has fled to a forest after allegedly killing five comrades near the North Korean border has pleaded with him to surrender.

There has been a massive manhunt for the soldier, identified only by his surname Yim, since authorities said he killed five and wounded seven on Saturday night before fleeing his front-line army unit with his standard issue K2 assault rifle.

The 22-year-old also fired on the troops chasing him, injuring a platoon leader and officials said a South Korean soldier was wounded by suspected friendly fire today.

Troops surrounded Yim so closely in the forest about four miles from the border outpost that they could toss him a mobile phone to talk to his father.

Yim, who still refused to surrender, had ammunition and officials feared he might “commit an extreme act” – an apparent reference to suicide – Defence Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said.

Besides the mobile phone, Yim’s parents also used a loudspeaker to try to persuade him to surrender.

It was not clear what triggered the rampage and there was no indication that South Korea’s bitter rival, North Korea, was involved.

Yim was due to complete his nearly two years of mandatory military service in September, according to defence officials. Initial personality tests last April put him within a group of soldiers who needed special attention and were unfit for front-line duty, a Defence Ministry official said. But tests last November concluded he had improved and could serve in the front-line area.

The rampage comes as South Koreans grapple with worries over public safety in the wake of an April ferry disaster that left more than 300 people dead or missing.

And some in Seoul have raised questions about the discipline and readiness of South Korea’s military, which is under near-constant threat from a North Korea that has recently staged a series of missile and artillery drills, traded fire with the South near a disputed maritime border and threatened South Korea’s leader.

“Due to a shortage of troops, even some soldiers on the list of special attention had to be on border guard, which requires soldiers to be heavily armed. Needless to say, the military needs to come up with remedial measures to this problem,” the Korea Times said in an editorial.

Hundreds of thousands of troops from the rival Koreas are squared off along the world’s most heavily armed border. The Korean Peninsula is still technically in a state of war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Shooting rampages against fellow soldiers happen occasionally. South Korea’s military maintains a conscription system requiring all able-bodied men to serve about two years because of the North Korean threat.

In 2011, a 19-year-old marine corporal went on a shooting rampage at a Gwanghwa Island base, just south of the maritime border with North Korea. Military investigators later said that corporal was angry about being shunned and slighted and showed signs of mental illness before the shooting.

In 2005, a soldier threw a hand grenade and opened fire at a front-line army unit in a rampage that killed eight colleagues and injured several others. Pfc Kim Dong-min told investigators he was enraged at superiors who verbally abused him.