(Seoul) North Korea launched three new missiles on Thursday, triggering an alert in an island off the Korean peninsula as well as in Japan, the day after an unprecedented salvo of fire that raised tension in the region.
Posted at 7:25 p.m.
Updated at 8:53 p.m.
According to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, three ballistic missiles, one long-range and two short-range, were launched Thursday morning from the North towards the Sea of Japan.
Air-raid sirens sounded for the second consecutive day on the South Korean island of Ulleungdo, located 120 km east of the Korean peninsula, local media reported.
Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada clarified that Japan had not been overflown by one of these projectiles, contrary to what the authorities had indicated earlier.
“The missile was detected as having the potential to fly over the Japanese archipelago and a (special) alert was issued, but after verifying this information, we confirmed that the missile did not cross the Japanese archipelago, but disappeared over the Sea of Japan,” Hamada said. “We are analyzing the reason” for this disappearance, he added.
Japanese television stations broadcast warnings to residents of the northern Niigata, Yamagata and Miyagi areas on Thursday morning, asking them to stay under cover, and the Shinkansen bullet train service was briefly suspended. suspended.
“The continuous barrage of missiles day after day is an outrage and cannot be tolerated,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Thursday.
On October 4, a North Korean ballistic missile flew over Japan for the first time in five years.
On Wednesday, North Korea had already fired 23 missiles, one of which had crossed the “Northern Limit Line” (NLL) which extends the inter-Korean land border at sea, while remaining in international waters.
“Territorial Invasion”
According to the South Korean military, it was the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953 that a North Korean projectile ended its course so close to southern territorial waters.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol called the shooting a “de facto territorial invasion”. Authorities in the South have closed several air corridors over the Sea of Japan to “ensure the safety of passengers on routes to the United States and Japan”.
The North Korean army then carried out around 100 artillery fire near the inter-Korean border in the east of the peninsula. The South retaliated by launching three missiles at sea, near the area where one of the North’s projectiles had landed.
This show of force by Pyongyang comes at a time when South Korea and the United States are carrying out the largest air exercises in their history in the region. North Korea sees this type of maneuver as a dress rehearsal for a future invasion of its territory.
This exercise, dubbed “Vigilant Storm”, constitutes “an aggressive and provocative military maneuver targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, said the North Korean regime, which threatened Seoul and Washington to “pay the most horrible price of history”.
The United States and South Korea have been warning for months that North Korea is preparing to carry out a nuclear test, which would be the seventh in its history and the first in five years.
At the end of September, Kim Jong-un’s regime adopted a new doctrine proclaiming the “irreversible” nature of the country’s nuclear power status, making any future talks about its denuclearization impossible, and reserving the right to carry out preventive strikes .
This proclamation was followed, in September and October, by a long series of missile tests, presented by Pyongyang as “tactical nuclear” simulations.
The recent series of firings “are preliminary celebrations for their future nuclear test”, predicted Ahn Chan-il, a researcher specializing in North Korea. “It also looks like a series of practical tests for their tactical nuclear deployment,” he told AFP.