North Korea fired 200 rounds of artillery into waters close to its disputed western sea border with South Korea on Friday, a provocation that prompted the South’s army to ask residents on a close-by island to take shelter.
The shells fell north of the disputed border, referred to as the Northern Restrict Line, between 9 and 11 a.m., and brought on no harm, South Korean officers mentioned.
The South’s army accused the North of “threatening peace and elevating tensions” and vowed to take “corresponding measures.” It supplied no additional particulars.
However because the South Korean army ready to conduct an analogous firing train in border waters, it requested folks on Yeonpyeong Island to hunt shelter starting at midday, island officers mentioned. A ferry that was scheduled to depart from Incheon, a port west of Seoul, the South Korean capital, to the island at 1 p.m. was additionally canceled.
“The army right here requested us to assist evacuate folks in case the North may hearth again when it began its personal drill,” mentioned Ji Younger-hyeon, a authorities official on Yeonpyeong. “So we’re sending out a broadcast each half-hour asking folks to take shelter.”
Folks residing on the island are cautious of North Korean provocations, particularly after the North launched an artillery and rocket barrage on the island in 2010 that killed two South Korean civilians and two marines there. In retaliation, the South pounded the North Korean shore throughout the water with artillery.
Residents on Yeonpyeong have grown accustomed to orders to depart their houses and evacuate to underground shelters. The island is dotted with underground and concrete shelters, and such orders are sometimes issued throughout army drills or when North Korea has launched its rockets to the south.
The North’s artillery firing got here a day after the South Korean and United States completed a weeklong joint live-fire army drill in Pocheon, north of Seoul, on Thursday that concerned artillery, tanks, armored autos and A-10 Warthog planes. In the identical day, North Korea vowed retaliation, calling its enemies “mad canine” who “will solely endure probably the most painful moments.”
The North Korean artillery firing on Friday was the primary because the North scrapped an settlement it signed with South Korea in 2018 to stop hostilities, reminiscent of live-fire army drills, close to the border. In November, South Korea suspended a part of the settlement by resuming surveillance flights close to the border to be higher in a position to monitor the nuclear-armed North Korean army. North Korea instantly introduced an finish to the whole settlement.
When the Korean Battle was halted in a truce in 1953, North Korea and the United Nations Command, which fought for the South, by no means agreed on a maritime border separating the 2 Koreas off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. The command has enforced the Northern Restrict Line as a brief border, however the North claimed a border a lot farther south of the road.
