Deserter Jenkins plans US visit

Mr Jenkins and his wife could travel to the US next week

A former US soldier who deserted to North Korea in 1965 is to visit the US for the first time in four decades.

Charles Robert Jenkins, who now lives in Japan after being given a dishonourable discharge from the US military, wants to visit his mother.

He will travel next week to North Carolina, where his 91-year-old mother is in a care home, Japanese media said.

Mr Jenkins left North Korea last year, giving himself up to US military authorities in Tokyo.

Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiken Sugiura told reporters that Mr Jenkins would travel with his Japanese wife and their two daughters.

"This is their private visit and they will leave soon to see his mother," he said.

Media interest

Mr Jenkins' case has received widespread media attention, partly because very few US soldiers have deserted to North Korea and partly because of his extraordinary life in the North.

Mr Jenkins, who said he deserted to avoid fighting in Vietnam, slipped across the border one night while on patrol in the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas.

In the North he married Hitomi Soga, one of five Japanese abducted by North Korea and freed in 2002. The couple has two North Korean-born children, Mika, 21, and Brinda, 19, and now live on the Japanese island of Sado, 300km (185miles) north of Tokyo.

Hitomi Soga was 19 when she was kidnapped from Sado by North Korean agents in 1978.

She met Mr Jenkins soon afterwards, when she was introduced to him so he could teach her English.

After his wife was freed and left for Japan in 2002, Mr Jenkins finally arranged, with the help of the Japanese government, to meet her in Indonesia in July, before returning to Japan to face US justice.