Shanghai:
A North Korean plane crashed in northern China on Tuesday, killing the pilot, the only person on board, according to China's state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, citing unnamed intelligence sources, said that the plane appeared to be a Soviet-era MiG-21 jet, a craft used by the North Korean Air Force, and that the pilot might have been trying to defect to Russia but lost course.
Although thousands of North Koreans have fled their repressive home country in the past decade and a half, it is highly unusual for an elite pilot to defect. A North Korean pilot flew his MiG-19 to defect to South Korea in 1983. Another North Korean pilot did the same in 1996. China's official policy is to return North Korean defectors, though in practice it allows many to stay on quietly.
Quoting an unidentified South Korean military source, Yonhap said the jet took off from an airfield in Sinuiju, a North Korean town on the far western border with China about 125 miles from the site of the crash. Xinhua said the plane crashed into a house in a rural area of Liaoning Province, which borders North Korea. The Chinese report, which described the crash as an accident, said that no one on the ground was killed or injured.
Cao Yunjuan, a 54-year-old farmer in Fushun County, where the crash occurred, said she saw the plane going down but that she heard no explosion. "Around 3 p.m. yesterday, I saw a small plane going down and soon it disappeared from my view," she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "There was no blast, though."
Ms. Cao said that she lived less than a mile from the crash site and that she and other villagers went to see the wreckage before the area was cordoned off by the police. Many saw a North Korean emblem on the plane's tail. Photographs of what appear to be the crash site show a North Korean star on the wreckage.
Xinhua said China was in communication with North Korea about the crash.