TOKYO: Charles Jenkins, a US Army deserter who spent four decades in communist North Korea and married a Japanese woman abducted by Pyongyang, has died at the age of 77, officials said on Tuesday.

According to the Asahi Shimbun daily, his daughter found him collapsed outside their house on Monday and called the emergency services.

He later died of heart problems at a hospital in the northern city of Sado, according to the local government.

He deserted during a drunken night in 1965, crossing the heavily fortified border into North Korea from the South.

He said later he was scared of being sent to Vietnam and thought North Korea would send him home.

Instead, he spent 39 years in Pyongyang, where he taught English to spy cadets in his North Carolina drawl and played a Yankee villain in propaganda films.

In 1980, he married Hitomi Soga, who was kidnapped by North Korean agents in the Cold-War era.

She was allowed to leave North Korea for Japan in 2002 and Jenkins followed her two years later with their two Korean-born daughters.

The Japanese government granted him permanent residency and he lived in Soga’s hometown on Sado, a picturesque island in the Sea of Japan.

Soga said in a statement released by the city government on Tuesday she was “very surprised” by his death and “cannot think of anything”.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2017