Nkorea’s new launches follow soldier’s defection

South Korea’s military said North Korea fired unidentified projectiles twice Friday into the sea off its eastern coast, its third weapons tests in just over a week.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the launches were conducted at 2:59 a.m. and 3:23 a.m. from an eastern coastal area, but it did not immediately confirm how many projectiles were fired or how far they flew.

The test came after a North Korean soldier defected by making a perilous midnight journey across the heavily fortified demilitarized zone into South Korea, defense officials in Seoul said Thursday, adding that they detained the man for questioning. The man crossed into South Korea late Wednesday and was spotted moving south along the Imjin River about 11:38 p.m., South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

“The man is an active-duty soldier, and he expressed his desire to defect to the South. Related procedures are underway,” a Joint Chiefs of Staff official said, according to South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap news agency.

About 1,100 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea last year, according to the South’s Unification Ministry. But it is relatively rare for North Koreans to attempt to cross directly to the South because that requires traversing the demilitarized zone, a heavily defended strip of no man’s land running across the peninsula that is dotted with military guard posts, land mines, barbed wire and other barriers.

Most North Koreans who flee their country do so by crossing the northern border into China and traveling overland to Southeast Asia, where they are picked up by South Korean officials.

In 2017, a North Korean soldier was shot repeatedly by his comrades as he made a dramatic escape to South Korea at the Joint Security Area, the only place on the frontier where North and South Korean forces come face to face. The last time a North Korean soldier defected via the DMZ was late last year.

Pyongyang’s missile tests are seen as an expression anger at plans by the United States and South Korea to hold joint military exercises this month.

The North’s state media said Thursday that its test on Wednesday was of a new type of large-caliber, multiple-launch, guided rocket system that could expand the North’s ability to strike South Korea and the American forces stationed there.

South Korea said the North had launched two short-range ballistic missiles that flew 155 miles off its east coast. It was unclear whether South Korea failed to distinguish largecaliber rockets from ballistic missiles or whether the rockets were launched as part of a weapons test that also included ballistic missiles. In recent years, as the rockets fired by North Korea from multiple-launch tubes flew higher and longer, they have occasionally been mistaken for ballistic missiles.