|
SEOUL: North Korean jet fighters have tested South Korean defenses
by flying near the border repeatedly in the past month, prompting
Seoul to scramble aircraft in response, news reports said Monday.
Seoul military authorities refused to comment on
the reports, which comes amid a flare-up in tensions between the two
nations.
The communist state’s official media claimed
Sunday that Seoul is planning a preemptive military strike and
threatened to turn South Korea into “ashes” if it went ahead.
In the past five days, the North has expelled
South Korean officials from a joint industrial complex, test-fired
missiles, accused Seoul of breaching a disputed sea border, and
threatened to suspend all dialogue.
Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted military sources as
saying the North’s jets, including MiG-21s, had flown near the
heavily fortified border 10 times since conservative President Lee
Myung Bak was inaugurated in Seoul on February 25.
Jets scrambled each time to intercept the
North’s aircraft according to their operational rules, said Chosun,
the South’s largest-circulation newspaper.
“It is very unusual for North Korean jet
fighters to fly southward so intensively in such a short period of
time as one month,” the paper said.
Chosun also said a North Korean mechanized army
unit was recently spotted moving south after a regular field
exercise, in what it called an unprecedented military move.
Yonhap news agency, quoting a military source,
said the North’s military has strengthened its winter land, sea
and air exercises. The drills have increased by more than 50 percent
this year over previous years, the Seoul agency said.
The North is angry at Lee’s tougher stance on
cross-border relations, especially his decision to link long-term
economic aid to progress in nuclear disarmament.
It blames the United States for delays in
carrying out a six-nation nuclear pact and said Friday it may slow
down work to disable its atomic plants.
The North staged a nuclear weapons test in
October 2006 but later agreed to scrap all its atomic programs and
material in return for energy aid, a lifting of US sanctions and
diplomatic ties with the United States.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)
office and the defense ministry refused to comment on the Chosun
report.
Analysts believe the North is intent partly on
swaying the outcome of South Korea’s April 9 general election in
which Lee’s conservative party is seeking a parliamentary
majority.
Late Saturday, the North’s chief delegate to
high-level military talks said all dialogue with South Korea might
be suspended and called for an apology over reported remarks by the
South’s military chief.
“Our revolutionary army will counter any
slightest move of the South’s ‘preemptive attack’ on our
nuclear bases with a more rapid and more powerful preemptive
attack,” the official Korean Central News Agency said Sunday.
-- AFP
|
