(SEOUL) South Korea announced on Wednesday that it had fired warning shots against a North Korean patrol boat which was trying to intervene after Seoul seized a North Korean vessel and its seven crew members.
Posted yesterday at 9:57 p.m.
This incident took place on the eve of the South Korean presidential election and in a context of heightened tensions with Pyongyang which, since the beginning of the year, has carried out a record number of missile launches.
After the warning shots, the North Korean patrol boat turned back towards the north, the same source said.
The seven crew members of the seized boat are being questioned by the authorities, according to the representative of the Ministry of Defense.
According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, they told authorities that they had crossed the inter-Korean maritime border following a “navigation error” and asked “to return” to North Korea.
The South Korean official refused to confirm these two reports, citing the ongoing investigation.
A patrol boat crossing the de facto maritime border “will inevitably take on a political dimension, because it happened on the eve of the presidential election in South Korea”, estimated Leif-Eric Easley, professor at Ewha University in Seoul. .
Pyongyang generally requires the immediate repatriation of its citizens, but the COVID-19 pandemic could complicate the operation, he added.
Since the start of the pandemic, North Korea has isolated itself from the rest of the world in order to protect itself from the virus in a country due to its notoriously poor health infrastructure and lack of vaccination of its population.
“People who have been in South Korea when the country is seeing a record number of COVID-19 cases may not be welcome,” Easley said.
South Korea is in the throes of a wave of the Omicron variant, with more than 200,000 new cases daily. More than a million residents who tested positive are currently in isolation at home, according to health authorities.
The Yellow Sea, off the Korean peninsula, has been the scene of military clashes between the two Koreas along the inter-Korean maritime border disputed by Pyongyang.
One of the deadliest incidents occurred in 2010 when a South Korean warship was torpedoed by a North Korean submarine, killing 46 sailors.
Pyongyang has denied any involvement in the attack.