North Korea fired “several cruise missiles” into the Yellow Sea, between the Korean Peninsula and China, on Friday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, quoted by Yonhap news agency.
These shots seem to be a new provocation for the arrival in South Korea of a US submarine and the meeting between Seoul and Washington.
According to Yonhap news agency, the launch took place around 4 a.m. (7 p.m. in Lisbon) and three days after the launch of two ballistic missiles, this time towards the Sea of Japan, on the opposite bank.
South Korean and U.S. intelligence agencies are analyzing these launches, while other details are as yet unknown, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff explained in a statement.
The South Korean military had explained on Wednesday that the two ballistic missiles fired by North Korea “landed in the Baltic Sea after flying about 550 kilometers each.”
North Korea’s launches earlier this week came just hours after the first meeting of the so-called Nuclear Consultation Council (NCG) between Seoul and Washington.
Following the session, the U.S. National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, announced the arrival in Busan, about 220 miles southeast of Seoul, of the USS Kentucky submarine, a nuclear-powered submarine capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the first of its kind to visit South Korea in about 40 years.
The North Korean Defense Ministry had already condemned the US plan to send the submarine to South Korea.
Then Kim Yo-jong, the sister of leader Kim Jong-un, accused the US of invading North Korean airspace and on July 12, the regime launched its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-18.
The test was condemned by United Nations (UN) Secretary General António Guterres.
The UN stressed that this missile, tested last week, landed in the waters of Russia’s exclusive economic zone and that that 75 minutes may be the longest flight of this type of missile of any missile ever tested by the North Korean military.
This week’s releases also come after a US soldier crossed the border into North Korea on a tourist visit and is currently in detention.
The United States announced on Thursday that it had sent messages to North Korea to at least ask how the American soldier who crossed the border of that country is doing.
Source: DN
