North Korea warned South Korea on Thursday it would attack and sink any warships that continued to cross a disputed border in the Yellow Sea. North Korea's navy command said a dispute between the neighbours over the border in the Yellow Sea, the scene of bloody clashes in recent years, was "inching close to a dangerous phase hour by hour."
"Such reckless intrusion may become a dangerous fuse to spark off the third skirmish in the West Sea (Yellow Sea) and, furthermore, a bigger war going beyond the skirmish," the command said in a report carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
The navy was prepared to send "all targets, big and small, intruding into its waters into the bottom of the sea any time," the report said. "The DPRK (North Korea) never makes empty talk," it said.
South Korea has rejected the North's repeated accusations of violating the sea border and has instead accused the North of the same thing. The North has insisted on redrawing a sea border marked by United Nations forces at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Seoul has agreed to discuss the issue at high-level military talks but demands that the maritime border be respected. Six South Koreans were killed in a naval skirmish in June 2002. In June 1999 a similar clash killed dozens of North Korean sailors.