North Korea accused a South Korean fishing boat of illegally entering its waters and said yesterday an investigation of four seized fishermen would continue.
South Korea has urged their quick release, saying the 29-ton vessel accidentally drifted across the sea border on Thursday after its satellite navigation system apparently malfunctioned.
North Korean soldiers towed the vessel to the eastern port of Jangjon, just north of the border, South Korean officials said.
A North Korean patrol ship “captured one ship of South Korea on July 30 when it illegally intruded deep” into the North’s territorial waters, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday.
An investigation into the incident would continue, the report said. The brief dispatch did not give any word on the fishermen’s condition or any other details.
North Korea’s military said on Friday in a written message to the South that “the issue of crew members and the vessel will be dealt with according to the outcome of the investigation,” the Unification Ministry in Seoul said.
Hours later, the South Korean military sent a written message repeating Seoul’s calls for the men and their boat to be quickly released, noting they crossed into the North’s waters because of an error.
Some analysts said the North could use the fishermen to exert pressure on Seoul amid badly strained ties between the two Koreas, which technically remain at war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce in 1953, not a peace treaty.
“I hope that my husband and three other crew members will quickly return home along with their boat,” Lee Ah-na, the wife of the boat’s skipper Park Kwang-sun, said from the eastern port of Geojin, just south of the border.
Maritime incidents involving fishing boats and other commercial vessels occur from time to time. While most are resolved amicably, two skirmishes involving military ships twice have sparked deadly naval battles, in 1999 and 2002.
North Korea, censured by the UN Security Council for a spate of nuclear and missile tests his year, has custody of a South Korean employee of the two Koreas’ joint industrial park in the border town of Kaesong, in addition to two US journalists sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor.
South Korea allowed a North Korean patrol vessel to tow away a North Korean fishing boat that crossed the countries’ disputed western maritime border on Thursday, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
Relations between the two Koreas have been tense since a pro-US, conservative government took office in Seoul last year advocating a tougher policy on the North.
Pyongyang cut off nearly all ties in retaliation, and halted major joint projects except for an industrial complex located just across the border in the North.
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