(REUTERS) South Korea’s military on Monday (August 10) accused North Korea of planting land mines inside the Demilitarised Zone border that exploded last week and wounded two of its soldiers, calling it a cowardly act of provocation, and threatened retaliation.
There was evidence to conclude the North’s soldiers crossed the Military Demarcation Line recently to plant the mines, and Pyongyang will be made to “pay a severe price,” the South’s military said in a news briefing without elaborating.
“Two South Korean soldiers, who were carrying out a regular search mission in the morning of August 4th on the southern side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) near the city of Paju in Gyeonggi Province, were severely injured by the blast of wooden-box mines which is clearly seen as the North Korea has planted,” Major General Ku Hong-mo of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
“We strongly condemn this cowardly act which is a violation of the Armistice Agreement and a nonaggression agreement between the South and the North and would be unthinkable for a normal military,” Ku added.
The two Koreas remain technically at war because a truce was signed at the end of their 1950-53 conflict, not a peace treaty.
The denunciation is likely to provoke an angry response from the North and further raise tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The United Nations Command, headed by the U.S. military and which oversees the armistice, also condemned what it called the North’s violation of the truce. It said it would call for a meeting with North Korea’s military.
The area where the blast happened last Tuesday had been swept for mines and the terrain made it impossible for mines planted elsewhere to have drifted due to rain or shifting soil, South Korea’s military said.
Fragments from the exploded mines also had paint typically used by the North, it said.
Two soldiers who were part of a team conducting a routine search operation inside the heavily fortified DMZ near the town of Paju, about 50 km (30 miles) north of Seoul, were seriously wounded in the blast.