Tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul reached a new peak on Wednesday when North Korea warned the new South Korean president to “watch her tongue.”
According to details, tensions soared when a South Korean solider on guard at the border threw a grenade at what he described was a “moving object in the dark.”
However, inspections in daylight revealed no trace of infiltration from North Korea, a minister spokesman said.
While a precautionary alert, which had been issued for South Korean units in the northeastern county of Hwacheon was lifted, South Korea’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions to save its starving people. She was marking the third anniversary of the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors.
In wake of the incident, North Korea lashed out at Guen-Hye and accused her of slander and provocation.
Furthermore, North Korea announced to cut off a military hotline with South Korea, signaling that all direct inter-government and military contact had been suspended after it previously cut a Red Cross link.
North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, a state body in charge of propaganda and inter-Korean affairs, said Park was following the anti-North stance of her predecessor Lee Myung-Bak.
“If she keeps to the road of confrontation like traitor Lee, defying the warnings of North Korea, she will meet a miserable ruin,” a statement said.
The committee urged Park to “behave with discretion, clearly mindful that a wrong word may entail horrible disaster” at a time of elevated military tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Moreover, North Korea’s military put rocket units on a war footing with a fresh threat to strike US targets as well as South Korea. Furthermore, a state-run Korean channel announced, “From this moment, the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army will be putting into combat duty posture number one all field artillery units, including long-range artillery units and strategic rocket units, that will target all enemy objects in bases on its mainland, Hawaii and Guam.”
Meanwhile, all of North Korea’s top leaders have been summoned to Seoul to discuss an “important” issue.
North Korea’s bureau of the Communist Party’s Central
Committee will convene its plenary meeting before the end of March to “discuss and decide an important issue for victoriously advancing the Korean revolution”, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
KCNA did not specify the date for the meeting, which will also reportedly make a “drastic turn” in accomplishing the North’s Juche (self-reliance) revolutionary cause.
This meeting could have been called in response to the new sanctions imposed on Pyongyang’s economic life beat; its main foreign exchange bank.
While North Korea issued fresh threats to Washington, it also said the new United Nations sanctions, issued after North Korea carried out a third nuclear test in February, were part of a Washington-led plot to topple its leadership.