Ten North Korean soldiers have tried to cross the Military Demarcation Line and head into South Korea but were forced away by warning shots, according to the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff
South Korea says its military has fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers crossed over the border.
Around 10 soldiers returned to the North’s territory after South Korea made warning broadcasts and fired warning shots, said the South’s military. It added that South Korea is closely monitoring North Korean activities after its soldiers crossed the Military Demarcation Line.
North Korea is continuing weapons tests and ignoring US President Donald Trump’s repeated outreach. Since his January 20 inauguration, Trump has said he would reach out to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again to revive diplomacy.
North Korea has not responded to Trump’s remarks and says US hostilities against it have deepened since Trump’s inauguration. South Korea, meanwhile, is experiencing a leadership vacuum after the ouster of President Yoon Suk Yeol last week over his ill-fated imposition of martial law.
Bloodshed and violent confrontations have occasionally occurred at the Koreas’ heavily fortified border, called the Demilitarized Zone. But when North Korean troops briefly violated the border in June last year and prompted South Korea to fire warning shots, it didn’t escalate into a major source of tensions.
South Korean officials assessed that the soldiers didn’t deliberately commit the border intrusion and the site was a wooded area and military demarcation line signs there weren’t clearly visible. South Korea said the North Koreans were carrying construction tools.
The motive for Tuesday’s border crossing by North Korean soldiers wasn’t immediately clear. The 248-kilometre long, four-kilometre wide DMZ is the world’s most heavily armed border. An estimated two million mines are peppered inside and near the border, which is also guarded by barbed wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides. It’s a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
Last month North Korea fired several ballistic missiles into the sea, South Korea’s military said, hours after South Korean and US troops kicked off their large annual combined drills, which the North views as an invasion rehearsal.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile firings, North Korea’s fifth missile launch event this year, were detected from the North’s southwestern Hwanghae province on March 10. It called the weapons close-range but didn’t say how far they flew. The military said South Korea bolstered its surveillance posture and is closely coordinating with the United States.
It followed the South Korean and US militaries beginning their annual Freedom Shield command post exercise, their first major combined training of Trump’s second term. The allies have already been engaging in diverse field training exercises in connection with the Freedom Shield training.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned the latest training risks triggering “physical conflict” on the Korean Peninsula. It called the drills an “aggressive and confrontational war rehearsal” and reiterated leader Kim Jong Un’s stated goals for a “radical growth” of his nuclear force to counter what he claims as growing threats posed by the US and its Asian allies.
This year’s training came after the South Korean and US militaries paused live-fire training while Seoul investigates how its fighter jets mistakenly bombed a civilian area during a warm-up drill last week.
About 30 people were injured, two of them seriously, when two South Korean KF-16 fighter jets mistakenly fired eight MK-82 bombs on a civilian area in Pocheon, a town near the North Korean border. The bombing occurred while South Korean and US forces were engaging in a live-fire drill ahead of the Freedom Shield exercise.