North Korea yesterday threatened to fire at lighting equipment used by “provocative” US and South Korean troops at a truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas.
The North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) accused US and South Korean soldiers of “deliberate provocations” by aiming their lights at North Korean guard posts at Panmunjom since Friday evening.
The KPA said in a statement that the soldiers’ actions have seriously threatened the safety of North Korean troops and disrupted their normal monitoring activities.
It said the activities have further raised the anger of North Korean soldiers at a time when the Korean Peninsula has reached the “brink of war” due to the start of annual joint military drills between the US and South Korea on Monday last week that Pyongyang says are an invasion rehearsal.
“Floodlight directed at the KPA side at random is taken as an intolerable means of provocation and it will be the target of merciless pinpoint shots,” the KPA’s chief security officers at Panmunjom said in the statement, carried by the North’s state media.
“The true aim sought by the provocateurs through their recent act is to seriously get on the nerves of the KPA soldiers, lead them to take due countermeasures and label them as provocation,” it said.
The South Korean Ministry of National Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Tuesday, the US-led UN Command in South Korea accused North Korea of planting land mines near the truce village.
Panmunjom, jointly overseen by North Korea and the UN Command, is where an armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War was signed and is now a popular tourist spot for visitors from both sides.
Under the armistice, the two sides are barred from carrying out any hostile acts within or across the 4km-wide Demilitarized Zone. Still, they have accused each other of deploying machine guns and other heavy weapons and combat troops inside the zone.
More than 1 million mines are believed to be buried inside the zone. In August last year, land mine blasts that Seoul blamed on Pyongyang maimed two South Korean soldiers and caused tensions to flare.
Pyongyang yesterday also expressed anger at UN Security Council discussions over a statement denouncing the country’s latest submarine-launched missile test.
North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Jon Min-dok told reporters that the US-led discussions at the UN were a “terrible provocation” and that the country is developing nuclear weapons because of “outrageous nuclear intimidation” by the US.
Jon spoke just before the Security Council concluded the discussions with a statement strongly condemning all four North Korean ballistic missile launches last month and this month, calling them “grave violations” of a ban on all ballistic missile activity.
“The best way for the US to escape a deadly strike from us is by refraining from insulting our dignity and threatening our security, by exercising prudence and self-control,” Jon said.
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