FINAL LANDMINES AT BORDER TOWN REMOVED

The two Koreas have completed removing landmines planted at their shared border village, South Korean officials said Monday.

The announcement came following a meeting among military officers from the Koreas and the U.S.-led UN Command at the border’s Panmunjom village earlier Monday. It’s the second such trilateral meeting to examine efforts to demilitarize Panmunjom, the most well-known place inside the 248-kilometre-long Demilitarized Zone that bisect the two Koreas.

As the next disarmament steps at Panmunjom, the two Koreas and the UN Command agreed on withdrawing weapons and guard posts there by Thursday. The three sides will then spend two days jointly verifying those measures, Seoul’s Defence Ministry said in a statement. The Koreas eventually aim to have 35 unarmed personnel from each side guard the village.

Officially, the entire DMZ area, including Panmunjom, is jointly overseen by North Korea and the UN Command, a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Panmunjom is where the armistice was signed. Numerous incidents of bloodshed and violence have taken place there since the war’s end, and rival soldiers face each other only feet away from each other at Panmunjom.