Police question Chinese students who flew a drone over USS Theodore Roosevelt in South Korea

South Korean police questioned three Chinese students who used a drone to record panoramic views of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt at Busan in June, a Busan Metropolitan Police officer said Thursday.

The three were suspected of illegally recording video of the carrier and South Korean Naval Operations Command on June 23 and June 25, the police officer told Stars and Stripes by phone.

The students, who police described as being in their 30s or 40s, were questioned and released but remain under investigation, the officer said.

South Korean government officials customarily speak to the media only on condition of anonymity.

The carrier arrived in Busan on June 22 ahead of Freedom Edge, several days of maritime exercises with warships of the South Korean and Japanese navies.

The three, students at a Busan university, are suspected of violating the Protection of Military Bases and Installations Act, which outlaws photographing military installations and equipment without approval from the unit or base commander, according to police. The officer did not identify the three by name, citing privacy concerns.

At 12:11 pm, a South Korean army officer on security duty discovered the three students operating a drone on a hill in Busan and held them for police, a South Korean navy spokesman told Stars and Stripes by phone Thursday.

The hill is popular with Busan locals as a lookout point, the police officer said.

“There is a viewing platform giving stunning views over the hill,” he said. “So, it is almost always crowded.”

The students had parked their car nearby and took the drone, which they told police they carry in the car, with them to the hill, the officer said. Police confiscated the drone and in it found about five minutes of footage of the carrier and naval base.

The three told police they took the footage only out of curiosity, the Busan officer said.

Police also confiscated their cellphones before releasing them and are reviewing their records. The three are not suspected of espionage, a police detective told Stars and Stripes by phone Thursday.

US authorities have not inquired about the incident, the police officer said.

The naval base typically increases security when US assets arrive, the navy spokesman said, but this incident may prompt a tightening of those measures. He said the drone did not appear in any surveillance video at the base.

In May, the US Navy in Japan investigated what appeared to be overhead imagery of the carrier USS Ronald Reagan, the amphibious command ship USS Blue Ridge and Yokosuka Naval Base and posted in Chinese to the social media platform X. The Navy found no indication a the drone had flown over the site, however.

Similar images of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force base at Yokosuka and the flattop helicopter destroyer JS Izumo appeared on the same account.