Seoul, June 27 (Reuters): The possibility of a romance and marriage across the Demilitarised Zone that divides the Korean peninsula had South Korea’s unification ministry scrambling today.

A South Korean business daily reported a South Korean manager for a gasket plant at a joint industrial park between the North and South, located just north of the border, had fallen in love with a female North Korean worker and was planning marriage. The company said the report was false, but the story caught the fancy of the South Korean media, which pondered the possibilities and potential for courtship and even marriage among workers at the Kaesong Industrial Park, which uses cheap North Korean labour to manufacture products for South Korean firms.

“Here at the industrial park complex, we have about 600 South Koreans and 3,200 North Koreans working together now,” a South Korean businessman who works in Kaesong said. “So there is the possibility of the love story report happening.”

The Kaesong site is developing into a place where there could be thousands of unmarried female North Korean workers in the same location each day with hundreds of South Korean men, many single. Since the years right after the 1950-1953 Korean War, marriage across the border that did not involve defections has been unheard of. The Maeil Business Newspaper reported a South Korean man who works at a plant that produces gaskets had fallen in love with a North Korean worker. The South Korean unification ministry called SJ Tech to find out if a marriage was in the offing, but was told the report was an exaggeration.