The US government has said it could not verify Pyongyang's statement that the soldier who crossed into North Korea without permission last month did so because he had ill feelings towards the army.
Several attempts had been made to contact Pyongyang through various channels, without success, a US State Department spokesman said on Wednesday.
On July 18, private Travis King crossed without permission the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two Korean nations, who are still officially at war since a conflict in the 1950s.
King admitted that he illegally intruded into North Korea, state-controlled media reported on Tuesday, citing an investigation into the events by the totalitarian, one-party state.
The report marks the first time Pyongyang confirmed King's whereabouts, having previously essentially only confirmed that it had received the US request for information on the matter.
According to the North Korean probe, the soldier confessed that he crossed into the country "as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the US Army," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
King was seeking refuge in North Korea or a third country "saying that he was disillusioned at the unequal American society," KCNA reported.
The case of the young US soldier has bewildered observers for weeks.
King had completed his deployment and should have returned home after spending time in a South Korean detention centre, the Pentagon said. He had been threatened with "additional administrative measures" in the US.
The Pentagon did not give details about the background of his detention, however South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the soldier had refused to pay fines for kicking and damaging a police car in Seoul.
The man had been escorted to the airport but disappeared before boarding the plane.
He later joined a commercial tour of the border, where he broke away from the group and crossed the DMZ.
The US Department of Defence opened an investigation into the case.
There was no information on the young man's motives, what he was doing in the hours between leaving the airport and crossing into North Korea, the Pentagon had previously said.
"It's probably half true, half propaganda," said Park Young Ho, a North Korea expert and former researcher at the South Korean Institute for National Unification, of the soldier's alleged comments.
No one knows what King really wanted, he said.
It remains to be seen whether the case will allow some opening of diplomatic channels between the two hostile parties.
North Korea, which is largely isolated internationally mainly because of its nuclear weapons programme, does not have diplomatic ties to the United States.
