South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, without citing a source, reported that South Korea fired about 90 machine gun rounds into the air and toward North Korea. It said South Korea was analyzing whether a North Korean drone had crossed the border.
In 2014, South Korean officials discovered what they described as several North Korean drones that had flown across the border. Those drones were crude and low-tech, but were still considered a potential new security threat.
The Koreas face off across the world’s most heavily armed border, and the two sides occasionally clash. In 2014, they traded machine gun and rifle fire after South Korean activists released anti-North Korean propaganda balloons across the Demilitarized Zone that bisects the Korean Peninsula, but no casualties were reported.
Attacks blamed on North Korea in 2010 killed 50 South Koreans.
The United States has been trying to persuade China, North Korea’s lone major ally, to do more to rein in North Korea, which has conducted dozens of missile launches and tested two nuclear bombs since the start of last year, in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions and resolutions.
The North has made no secret of its plans to develop a missile capable of striking the United States and has ignored calls to halt its weapons programmes, even from China. It says the programme is necessary to counter U.S. aggression.
“We urge North Korea to not do anything to again violate U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a statement posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website on Tuesday.
“At the same time, we hope all parties can maintain restraint, not be influenced by every single incident, …persist in carrying out Security Council resolutions on North Korea and persevere with the resolution of the issue through peaceful means, dialogue and consultation.”
Wang was responding to reporters’ questions on Monday while in Ivory Coast, according to the statement.