Korean fears fire up again

North Korea was conducting live-fire drills on its western coast, Yonhap news agency reported yesterday, the third consecutive day of military exercises near the contested maritime border with the South.

"The North Korean military has been conducting the drills north of the South Korean front-line island of Yeonpyeong since around 4 pm," it cited a military source as saying, with 90 rounds fired.

No artillery shell has fallen south of the Northern Limit Line, the de-facto maritime border in the Yellow Sea.

Residents on the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong were warned to stay inside due to the drills and any possible South Korean countermeasures.

On Friday and Saturday, North Korea fired artillery rounds in the same area - near Yeonpyeong and Baengnyeong.

Residents were ordered to evacuate to shelters and ferry services were suspended during one of the most serious military escalations since Pyongyang fired shells at one of the islands in 2010. On both days, the shells landed in a buffer zone created under a 2018 tension-reducing deal, which fell apart in November after the North launched a spy satellite.

Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, denied Seoul's claims of artillery fire on Saturday, saying they had instead conducted a "deceptive operation."

That was said to involve the military detonating explosives simulating the sound of gunfire 60 times to gauge the reaction of South Korean forces.

"The result was clear as we expected," she said, adding: "They misjudged the sound as the sound of gunfire and conjectured it as a provocation. And they even made a false and impudent statement that the shells dropped in the sea buffer zone."