South Korea fired warning shots at North Korean soldiers that briefly crossed the heavily fortified border earlier this week, Seoul said yesterday after Pyongyang accused it of risking “uncontrollable” tensions.
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has sought warmer ties with the nuclear-armed North and vowed to build “military trust,” but Pyongyang has said it has no interest in improving relations with Seoul.
Seoul’s military said several North Korean soldiers crossed the border on Tuesday while working in the heavily mined demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas.
Photo: Yonhap via AP
The incursion prompted “our military to fire warning shots,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, adding that “the North Korean soldiers then moved north” of the de facto border.
Pyongyang’s state media said earlier yesterday that the incident occurred as North Korean soldiers worked to permanently seal the frontier dividing the peninsula, citing a statement by Army Lieutenant General Ko Jong-chol.
Ko called the event a “premeditated and deliberate provocation,” saying that South Korea’s military used a machine gun to fire more than 10 warning shots toward the North’s troops, the Korean Central News Agency reported.
“This is a very serious prelude that would inevitably drive the situation in the southern border area where a huge number of forces are stationing in confrontation with each other to the uncontrollable phase,” Ko said.
The last border confrontation between the two Koreas was in early April, when South Korea’s military fired warning shots after about 10 North Korean soldiers briefly crossed the frontier.
North Korea’s military announced on October last year that it was moving to totally shut off the southern border, saying it had sent a message to US forces to “prevent any misjudgment and accidental conflict.”
Shortly after, it blew up sections of the unused, but deeply symbolic roads and railroad tracks that connect the North to the South.
Ko warned that the North Korean army would retaliate against any interference with its efforts to permanently seal the border.
“If the act of restraining or obstructing the project unrelated to the military character persists, our army will regard it as deliberate military provocation and take corresponding countermeasure,” he said.
Korea Institute for National Unification senior analyst Hong Min said that Pyongyang was again accusing Seoul of pursuing a “dual approach” with its latest outburst — calling for dialogue while in its view raising military tensions.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called earlier this week for the “rapid expansion” of the North’s nuclear weapons capability, citing ongoing US-South Korean military exercises which he claimed could “ignite a war.”
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