N. Korea says shelling incident caused by S. Korean provocation

New Delhi, Dec.9 (ANI): North Korea has blamed South Korea for last month's shelling of Yonphyong Island, saying that Seoul's "deliberate provocation" fuelled its aggressive response.

According to a detailed report, released by the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the North Korean Government said South Korea was the agent provocateur and was wholly to blame for the incident.

The motive of the incident and the background "make it clearer that it was a deliberate provocation" of ROK, Xinhua quoted the report, as saying.

"ROK "fired as many as thousands of shells into the territorial waters of the DPRK side. This reckless act was obviously a deliberate provocation to prompt the DPRK to take a military counteraction," Pyongyang claimed.

It also described the United States as "a wire-puller and chieftain" of the incident.

Tensions have mounted on the Korean Peninsula after the DPRK and ROK exchanged artillery fire on Nov 23 in waters near the disputed sea border known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL).

During the incident, shells landed on ROK's Yonphyong Island near the NLL, leaving four dead.

The so-called NLL, which was declared unilaterally by the US-led United Nations Command after the 1950-1953 Korean War, remains a source of tensions and skirmishes between the two sides of the peninsula.

ROK regards the NLL as the de-facto Western inter-Korean border, but the DPRK has rejected the NLL and only recognized the demarcation line it drew in 1999, which was further south of the NLL. (ANI)