All S.Koreans withdraw from joint factory park with DPRK

North Korea has ordered a military takeover of an industrial complex that was the last significant symbol of cooperation with South Korea, calling Seoul’s withdrawal from the jointly run plant a “dangerous declaration of war”. But South Korean officials didn’t know what would happen to its nationals who had not departed by North Korea’s 5:30 p.m. (Seoul time) Thursday expulsion deadline; they also wouldn’t say how many workers remained at the factories.

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear weapons test last month and on Sunday fired a long-range rocket over Japanese airspace in what is widely believed to be a test of a new missile system.

The United States supported the move by its close ally, and said it was considering its own, unspecified “unilateral measures” to punish Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test and rocket launch, even as the U.N. Security Council deliberates imposing more multilateral sanctions.

“We’ve made a decision to halt the operation of the Kaesong complex to prevent South Korean money from being funneled into the North’s nuke and missile developments and to protect our companies”, South Korean Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo said.

The North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland also said it will freeze all South Korean assets at the inter-Korean factory park.

Owners of the 124 South Korean companies operating factories in the estate, who said their businesses were being destroyed by politics, slammed the move as “utterly incomprehensible”.

South Korea on Wednesday gave South Koreans until Saturday to quit the complex. In 2013, Pyongyang withdrew its workers for months after its third nuclear test, returning them after the countries agreed on steps to improve ties, including reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

South Korean business groups had called their government’s decision hasty.

“If you look at our government’s way of handling North Korea, that apparently it is hoping for some kind of major collapse of the North Korea regime”.

He said he was not sure whether he would return to the South on Thursday.

State media reported that tens of thousands of North Korean employees would also be pulled out, with South Korean assets frozen and cross-border communications shut down.

Rising tension… South Korean protesters burn an effigy of North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un during an anti-North Korea rally on Thursday in Seoul, South Korea.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency is reporting that South Korea has bolstered military readiness along the western portion of the Koreas’ border after the North Korean decision to expel South Koreans from a joint factory park.

It had splashed down in some 270 pieces after exploding during midair-detachment, according to the Defense Ministry, which said the North may have designed the automatic explosion in order to avoid the exposure of their rocket technology.

The execution of Ri, chief of the North Korean military’s general staff, would be the latest in a series of killings, purges and dismissals since Kim took power in late 2011. “They have been really anxious about it”, one South Korean worker told reporters.

“Now we can say that all strings between the Koreas have been cut and that there are no more buffers”, said Dr Ko Yoo Hwan, a professor of North Korean Studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.