Missiles after threat

Peace efforts in jeopardy as North Korea fires three projectiles

NORTH Korea fired three short-range projectiles off its east coast yesterday, South Korea’s military said, two days after the North threatened to take “momentous” action to protest outside condemnation over its earlier live-fire exercises.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the three launches were made from an eastern coastal town in the North’s South

Hamgyong province. It said the multiple kinds of projectiles flew as far as 200km at a maximum altitude of 50km.

The statement said South Korea expressed “strong regret” over the launches that it said violated a past inter-Korean agreement aimed at lowering military animosities.

South Korea’s national security director, defence minister and spy chief held an emergency video conference and agreed the North Korean actions were not helpful to efforts to establish a peace on the Korean Peninsula, according to South Korea’s presidential Blue House.

Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat detected at least one projectile but said it presumably had not reached Japan’s territorial waters or exclusive economic zone. It said North Korea’s repeated launches posed a serious threat to international security.

In the past 10 days, North Korea has said leader Kim Jong-un supervised two rounds of live-fire artillery exercises in its first weapons tests since late November.

Mr Kim had entered the new year with a vow to bolster his nuclear deterrent and not to be bound by a major weapons test moratorium amid a deadlock in a US-led diplomacy aimed at convincing Mr Kim to abandon his nuclear program in return for economic and political benefits.

South Korea and some European countries protested against the second North Korea drills on March 1, which they believed involved ballistic missile launches in a violation of UN Security Council resolutions.