A North Korean defector who had made a daring return to his home country at the weekend had reportedly struggled to find a new life in South Korea since his arrival just over a year ago.
On Saturday, a man who has not been named crossed the heavily armed demilitarized zone DMZ that has divided North and South since the end of the 1950 to 1953 Korean war.
The defector, who is in his 30 s, had been prompted to make a dangerous journey back across the border after struggling to make ends meet in the South, according to reports.
His decision to return to North Korea has raised questions about how defectors are treated in the South, where many face discrimination in employment, education and housing.
The North hasn't publicly commented on the man one of around 30 double-defectors who have returned to their home country from the South in the past decade, but has acknowledged receipt of messages from the South Korean military about his escape, the Yonhap news agency said.
The man, who had worked as a cleaner, appeared to have been experiencing financial difficulties, according to a South Korean military official. The official said he was classified as a lower class, barely scraping a living.
Officials said they had no reason to believe that the man had been spying for the North and they launched an inquiry into how he was able to negotiate a barbed wire fence along the 248 km long border, which is dotted with landmines and patrolled by troops around the clock despite being caught on surveillance cameras hours earlier.
The man, who had fled North Korea in November 2020, identified himself as a former gymnast, and told investigators he had crawled over barbed wire fences to reach the South, according to a defence ministry statement.
An official at the South Korean unification ministry said he had received resettlement support from the government for his personal security, housing, medical treatment and employment since arriving in the South via the same eastern section of the DMZ.
He had been spotted throwing away his belongings the day before he fled to the South, Yonhap said.
He was taking out a mattress and bedding to rubbish dumps that morning, and it was strange because they were all too new, a neighbour told Yonhap. I thought about asking him to give it to us, but ended up not doing that because we never said hello to each other. Since the late 1990s, more than 33,000 North Koreans have defected to the South via China and south-east Asia to escape political persecution, food shortages and poverty.
While some, such as the national assembly member Ji Seong-ho, go on to become highly successful in the wealthy, democratic South, many others struggle to find well-paid work.
According to the unification ministry data, about 56% of the defectors are classified as being on low incomes, and nearly 25% are in the lowest bracket, making them eligible for basic livelihood subsidies six times the ratio of the general population.
According to a survey released last month by the Database Center For North Korean Human Rights and NK Social Research in Seoul, 18% of the 407 defectors said they were willing to return to the North, most of them citing nostalgia for the country they had left behind.
There are a number of factors, including longing for families left in the North, and emotional and economic difficulties that arise while resettling, the unification ministry official said. The government is working to improve our support programmes to help them resettle in the South.