North Korea says it will expel Travis King, U.S. soldier who ran across border in July

North Korea announced Wednesday that it will expel Travis King, the American soldier who crossed into the country two months earlier, according to the country’s state-run media. North Korea’s KCNA television network said King had confessed to illegally entering the country.

“The investigation into Travis King, a U.S. soldier who was detained after illegally invading the territory of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [North Korea] from the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom on July 18, has been completed,” KCNA said in its report, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.   

It was not immediately clear when King might be deported from North Korea, or where the isolated nation would send him.

King, a Private 2nd Class in the U.S. Army, entered North Korea while taking part in a guided tour of the border village of Panmunjom, which he joined after absconding from an airport in Seoul, South Korea, where he was supposed to have boarded a flight back to the U.S.

North Korea previously claimed that King had told investigators he crossed the border because he, “harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army.”

The U.S. military said at the time that it could not verify those allegations.

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