Seoul

A North Korean "active-duty soldier" has said he wants to defect to South Korea after crossing the heavily fortified inter-Korean border, according to Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Thursday.

The man was discovered Wednesday night inside the Demilitarized Zone.

"After confirming that an unidentified object spotted by our thermal observation devices was a person, our military took him safely into custody in accordance with due protocol," the JCS said in a statement carried by local news agency Yonhap.

Such direct defections are rare compared with the thousands that have taken place via China.

However, there was a similar incident last December, while a North Korean soldier survived being shot multiple times by his own comrades as he successfully crossed into the South in 2017.

The Koreas have been making efforts to calm tensions at the border during a period of cooperation and denuclearization dialogue that began last year.