North Korea warned South Korea this Tuesday that it will not allow the entry of South Korean troops into its territory by a single millimeter and that, if that happens, it will trigger a "counterattack as powerful as it is immediate." This new warning adds to several days of threatening messages following the explosion of a mine in the Demilitarized Zone, which left three South Korean soldiers injured two weeks ago and whose authorship Seoul attributes to the North Korean Army.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pyongyang has reacted this way to the conclusions disseminated on Monday by the South Korean Armed Forces, which clearly hold North Korea responsible for the placement of the mines that exploded on September 21 in the border strip.
On that same September 21, in what constitutes the first operation of this type carried out in the DMZ, South Korean Defense Minister Kang Shin Chul made public the start of a demining mission in the area where the detonations occurred.
According to the statement from the North Korean ministry, reported by the South Korean news agency Yonhap, Pyongyang "doesn't care" that Seoul "removes mines that don't matter." However, it emphasized that "as soon as a single South Korean boot crosses the border even by a millimeter, as soon as a single spark falls, the border guard forces of the DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea) will launch a powerful and immediate counterattack."