North and South Korea exchange fire

In response the South Korean military fired tens of artillery rounds towards North Korea.

Earlier, South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency cited military sources who reportedly claimed that North Korea fired artillery shells on South Korea earlier in the day.

A week later, the South began using loudspeakers to broadcast anti-Pyongyang rhetoric across the western and central parts of the border, resorting to a practice suspended by both sides since 2004.

The North had already asked the South on Saturday to halt the propaganda broadcasts or face military action.

Thursday’s events come after the U.S. and South Korea began annual joint war games called Ulchi Freedom Guardian on Monday.

The incident triggered a brief exchange of heavy machine-gun fire and scuppered a planned resumption of high-level talks. Pyongyang has denied responsibility.

The spokesman said South Korean troops had been placed on highest-level alert, while President Park Geun-Hye reportedly called and chaired an emergency meeting of her National Security Council.

South Korean news agency Yonhap said the shots did not cause any apparent damage.

About 80 residents in the South Korean town where the shell fell, Yeoncheon, were evacuated to underground bunkers, and authorities urged other residents to evacuate, a Yeoncheon official said, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

The spike in inter-Korean tension over the exchange of artillery fire is likely to have a limited effect on South Korea’s financial market, a vice finance minister said Friday.

After the landmine incident, South Korea restarted cross-border propaganda broadcasts via loudspeakers that had sat dormant for over a decade. It threatened over the weekend to blow up the South Korean speakers, CNN reports.

The North’s suspected firing across the border on Thursday marked the first such action in nearly five years since it shelled South Korea’s western-most Yeonpyeong Island, Gyeonggi, in November 2010, killing two Marines and two civilians.

Because the 1953 armistice was never replaced with a peace treaty, the two Koreas remain technically at war and the DMZ – despite its name – is one of the most heavily-militarised frontiers on the planet.