Home GRASP GRASP/Korea South Korea opened fire at tense border zone. Turns out incursion was...

South Korea opened fire at tense border zone. Turns out incursion was North Korean balloons

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Military officials now believe the incident that led South Korea to fire warning shots resulted from a group of large North Korean balloons
The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea’s border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air.
What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion — perhaps a drone flight over the two countries’ highly secured border — turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday.
After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons — likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state’s ideological adversaries in the South.
Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That’s because of the North’s continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.
On Tuesday, though, the payload was obviously less threatening — a fact that emerged many hours after military officials fired shots and later told the news media about the incident.
South Korean military officials, closely allied with American forces, said Wednesday that their troops hadn’ t overreacted to the potential provocation, which to them was reminiscent of a drone flight 18 months ago by the North that also prompted gunfire.
“We prepared for the worst-case scenario of the object being an enemy drone, ” said Moon Sang-gyun, a South Korean military spokesman. “We prepared thoroughly according to procedure until the object was clearly identified.”
The governments of both nations, still locked in a decades-old and unsteady truce after Korean War, on occasion send propaganda messages across their shared border. The South has used massive loudspeakers to announce propaganda to the North’s troops and residents in its southern villages, for example.
But South Korean officials said the wind direction and the balloons’ shape in this case pointed to an effort by the North to most likely deliver anti-democracy messages.

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