A North Korean surveillance drone flew over a South Korean military outpost without interruption, just hours before the two Koreas kicked off talks on easing military tensions in late August, defense sources said Wednesday.
The unmanned aerial vehicle, measured slightly longer than 3 meters, crossed the demilitarized zone, which bisects the peninsula, and flew above the compound along the central part of the four-kilometer-wide military buffer, the sources said.
The flight took place about two to three hours before the two Koreas began their rare high-level talks on the evening of Aug. 22. The negotiations at the truce village of Panmunjom lasted for more than 40 hours and led to a breakthrough deal in inter-Korean ties.
After trading artillery shells over the DMZ on Aug. 20, the North put its military on war footing and threatened an all-out war with the South, sharply increasing inter-Korean tensions.
The Aug. 25 deal brought the two sides back to peace-time mode, having elicited an expression of “regret” from North Korea on the blast of land mines which maimed two South Korean soldiers in early August and was blamed on the communist country.
The drone flight was presumed to be aimed at monitoring the posture of the South Korean military along the border as the two countries maintained top-level military alert.
At that time, the South Korean military detected the appearance of the drone through its low altitude surveillance radar and an Air Force surveillance system, but failed to intercept it, according to the sources.
The military issued its antiaircraft alert, ‘Hedgehog’ and sent an AH-1S Cobra attack helicopter and an Air force fighter jet to track down the drone, yet without success, the sources noted. The North Korean drone presumably returned home safely.
“Even in the DMZ area, any North Korean soldier or vehicles that crossed the military demarcation line are immediately subject to warning shots or artillery fire,” one of the sources said, stressing that Seoul would be more prepared to deal with infiltration of North Korean drones.
Confirming the uninterrupted flight, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said traces of an unknown vehicle were detected by radar on several occasions from Aug. 22-24, but the military’s capacity to hit it was “limited” because the radar detected and lost it repeatedly. (Yonhap)
