SHANGHAI ? A North Korean plane crashed in northern China on Tuesday, apparently 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 military jet and that the pilot might have been trying to defect.
Xinhua said the plane crashed into a house in a rural area of Liaoning Province, which borders North Korea. The Chinese report said that no one on the ground was killed or injured in the accident.
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 she lives less than a mile from the crash site and that when she and other villagers went to see the wreckage, many saw a North Korean emblem on the plane’s tail.