South Korea blames North for DMZ mine blast

The land mines used wooden boxes and were of North Korean origin and were probably planted between July 22 and Tuesday, he said. It was unclear when the broadcasts would start or how long they would continue.

“The North probably carried out the provocation to disrupt” upcoming South Korea-U.S. military drills later this month, a military source speculated. They exploded as the soldiers opened the gate of a barbed-wire fence to begin a routine morning patrol, said Brigadier-General Ahn Young-ho, a military investigator. One man lost both legs, while the other lost one.

Switching the loudspeakers back on is sure to trigger a strong reaction from the North, which already complains regularly and bitterly about Seoul’s refusal to ban activists floating anti-North leaflets across the border by helium balloon.

South Korea restarted radio broadcasts and restored 11 loudspeakers four years later as part of measures taken after a warship sinking blamed on North Korea that killed 46 South Korean sailors.

Kim Min Seok, a spokesman for the South Korea defence ministry, said: “We are strengthening defence postures [along the border] against another potential provocation by the North”. He said the broadcasts emphasized that the mine explosions were a provocation by the North.

The new drills will be separate from the annual “Ulchi Freedom Guardian”, the joint US-South Korean exercises that will start next Monday and last for two weeks.

North Korean officials have yet to comment on the incident. It said it would call for a meeting with North Korea’s military.

The explosions come amid continuing bad feelings between the rival Koreas over the establishment of a UN office in Seoul tasked with investigating the North’s alleged abysmal human rights conditions. One reason was allegedly given by South Korean officials: “American troops stationed in Japan and South Korea would be using the same time if war broke out”.

“Most foreign investments in North Korea have ended badly, but most of those people had very superficial understanding of the place and did not have insider connections”, said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul.

During and after the Korean War, both Koreas planted hundreds of thousands of mines in and near each side of the DMZ to thwart infiltrators.

The last direct attack on the South was in November 2010 when North Korea shelled the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong, killing two civilians and two soldiers.