North Korea Exchanges Fire With South Korea Over Loudspeaker

The incident started when North Korea fired a rocket at a South Korean border area, prompting Seoul’s forces to reply with an artillery barrage.

KBS News, which is state-run, quoted a South Korean military official as saying that North Korea opened fire at around 4pm local time (7pm GMT) on the western front.

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

On that occasion, South Korea responded by shelling North Korean positions, triggering brief fears of a full-scale conflict. It threatened over the weekend to blow up the South Korean speakers, CNN reports. (North and South Korea engaged in a minor skirmish in the Yellow Sea last year.) For now the audio arms race continues, as neither side has relented and taken down its loudspeakers.

The North Korean rocket was reportedly aimed at a front-line military unit in Yeoncheon, 35 miles northwest of Seoul.

Top South Korean economic and financial policymakers will meet early on Friday to discuss the impact on the economy and markets from the exchange of fire with North Korea, the finance ministry said.

Tension between the two Koreas has risen since early this month when landmine explosions in the demilitarised zone wounded two South Korean soldiers. North Korea, meanwhile, convened an enlarged emergency meeting of the central military commission of its ruling party.

In response, South Korea set up loudspeakers to blast propaganda messages across the border to the North, delivering news from the outside world to the information-starved North Koreans living on the border.

Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Dongguk University, said he did not expect Pyongyang to escalate the exchange of fire into a major skirmish. South Korea retaliated by firing dozens of artillery rounds into North Korea, toward the site of the rocket’s launch. The North’s soldiers fired back in an exchange of gunfirethat lasted about 10 minutes, with no casualties. Seoul and Washington say the drills are defensive in nature.

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.