The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has denied Seoul’s claims that Pyongyang has fired dozens of artillery shells near their border, AFP reported.
Seoul’s military said North Korean forces fired more than 60 artillery shells near Yeonpyeong Island, a day after the two sides held live-fire drills in the same area near their disputed maritime border.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the projectiles fell in the buffer zone established under a 2018 de-escalation agreement. That deal fell apart in November after the North launched a spy satellite.
“Our military has not fired a single projectile into the water area,” Kim Yo Jong said.
Instead, Kim claimed that her country’s military had detonated 60 times explosives imitating the sound of a gunshot and “monitored the reaction” of South Korean forces.
“The result was exactly what we expected,” she said, adding: “They misjudged the sound of the explosives as gunfire, assumed it was a provocation with artillery fire, and shamelessly made up a lie.”
“In the future, they will misjudge even the rumble of thunder in the northern sky as artillery fire from our military,” she said.
Residents of two South Korean islands near the border were ordered to evacuate after the North fired more than 200 artillery shells near Yeonpyeong and Baengnyong during live-fire drills.
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in decades since leader Kim Jong Un last year enshrined his country’s status as a nuclear power into the constitution and test-fired several advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles.
During political meetings in Pyongyang at the end of the year, Kim threatened a nuclear attack on the South and called for an increase in his country’s military arsenal ahead of an armed conflict that he warned could “break out at any moment”.
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2024-01-07 10:30:00
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