Last Friday, on the day preliminary voting started for the South Korean general election, the Ministry of Unification (MoU) circulated an announcement there would be a 5 p.m. press briefing.

There, the spokesperson for the ministry announced that a “group of defectors, composed of one male manager and 12 female waitresses, arrived in Seoul on April 7.”

The announcement turned heads, and not just because of the defectors themselves. Media reports about defections frequently circulate, but the MoU, citing the safety of the defectors’ families in the North, rarely confirms them, even when they occur as long as a decade