North Korean patrol boats fired upon a South Korean navy patrol boat 14 miles from Yeonpyeong Island, three miles south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the West Sea at 10:25am Saturday, starting an exchange of fire that lasted 25 minutes. Four seamen have died, one is missing, and 20 are injured. One South Korean high speed patrol boat sank, and one North Korean patrol boat, having been hit with several hundred rounds of fire, is believed to have suffered considerable human and structural damage.
The entire military has been put on alert and the United Nations Security Command has sent a telephone message to the North calling for a meeting at Panmunjom at 6:00pm.
According to the Ministry of National Defense, at approximately 9:54am Saturday, two North Korean patrol boats were intercepted by navy vessels and repeatedly ordered to return to their side of the NLL before one of the North's boats opened fire. Other ROK Navy ships soon joined the exchange. At proximately 10:43am one of the North Korean boats caught fire, and then at around 10:50am the other began heading for the NLL, continuing its barrage of fire as it went.
This is the first gun battle between the navies of North and South since 1999 and it is expected that the atmosphere of reconciliation and cooperation created by the intra-Korean summit of 2000 will be considerably damaged by Saturday's event, as each side begins to lay blame on the other.
"As of now we don't know what the North's intentions were," said Lieutenant-general Lee Sang-hui of the operations section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a press briefing after the battle. "What is important is that the enemy opened fire first, there was considerable damage, and that it was the enemy's conscious intention to do this." He added that this "act of provocation" was a clear violation of the armistice agreement the responsibility for which lies with the North, and that the government would be taking action in response.
North Korea’s state-run Central Broadcasting Station reported the exchange at 4:00pm, some five and a half hours after the incident, insisting that the ROKN "dared a military provocation by opening fire on the People's Navy patrol boats on the West Sea."
Citing military sources, the station said that "the enemy vessels" fired at the patrol boats around 10:10am, and the North Korean vessels engaged in the short battle as a self-defensive measure, which damaged both sides. However, it did not mention the extent of the damage.
It added South Korean military authorities staged the shocking incident in the West Sea to intensify tension between Seoul and Pyongyang, claiming the incident was a planned military provocation by South Korea.
(Seo Ban-seok, seobs@chosun.com)
