North Korea has confirmed it destroyed an inter-Korean liaison office and has cut all communication lines with South Korea.
The move comes just hours after the North renewed threats of military action against ‘the enemy’ South after days of rising tensions.
Earlier, South Korea said the building – in the North Korea border town of Kaesong – had ‘exploded’, with images showing smoke billowing from the area.
Tensions have been rising over Seoul’s failure to stop defector groups from flying propaganda leaflets across the border.
Some experts say North Korea is also expressing its frustration because the South is unable to resume joint economic projects due to US-led sanctions.
On Saturday night Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, warned that Seoul will soon witness ‘a tragic scene of the useless North-South liaison office being completely collapsed.’
She said she would give North Korea’s military the right to take the next step of retaliation against the South.
On Tuesday, the military threatened to send troops back into zones that were demilitarised under inter-Korean peace agreements.
The General Staff of the Korean People’s Army said it is reviewing a ruling party recommendation to advance into unspecified border areas that had been demilitarised under agreements in 2018, which would ‘turn the front line into a fortress.’
A statement from the KPA chief, carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, said: ‘Our army is keeping a close watch on the current situation in which the (North-South) relations are turning worse and worse, and getting itself fully ready for providing a sure military guarantee to any external measures to be taken by the party and government’.
While it wasn’t immediately clear what actions North Korea’s military might take against the South, the North has threatened to abandon a bilateral military agreement reached in 2018 to reduce tensions across the border.
In 2018, the rival Koreas opened their first liaison office at Kaesong, North Korea, to facilitate better communication and exchanges since their division at the end of the World War II in 1945.
When the office opened, relations between the Koreas flourished after North Korea entered talks on its nuclear weapons program.
Inter-Korean relations have been strained since the breakdown of a second summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Vietnam in early 2019.
That summit fell apart because of disputes over how much sanctions should be lifted in return for Kim’s dismantling his main nuclear complex.
Kim later vowed to expand his nuclear arsenal, introduce a new strategic weapon and overcome the US.-led sanctions that he said ‘stifles’ his country’s economy.
Credit: Metro.co.uk
