N Korea threatens to fire at US, S Korea troops

Seoul, Aug 27: North Korea on Saturday (Aug 27) threatened to aim fire at the lighting equipment used by "provocative" American and South Korean troops at a truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas. The North's Korean People's Army accused US and South Korean soldiers of "deliberate provocations" by aiming their lights at North Korean guard posts at Panmunjom since on Friday evening (Aug 26).

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 last Monday's start of annual joint military drills between the US and South Korea 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.

South Korea's Defense Ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The statement by North Korea's military came hours after the United Nations Security Council issued a statement strongly condemning four North Korean ballistic missile launches in July and August.

On Tuesday, the American-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 1950-53 Korean War was signed and is now a popular tourist spot for visitors from both sides.

Under the Korean War armistice, the two sides are barred from carrying out any hostile acts within or across the 2.5-mile-wide DMZ. Still, they have accused each other of deploying machine guns and other heavy weapons and combat troops inside the zone. More than a million mines are also believed to be buried inside the DMZ.

In August 2015, land mine blasts that Seoul blamed on Pyongyang maimed two South Korean soldiers and caused tensions between the two Koreas to flare.

(AP) SAI