North Korean Land Mine Kills One South Korean, Injures Another

A North Korean mine which drifted along a river into the neighbouring South killed a man and badly injured another when it exploded, military officials said Sunday.  Several wooden box mines have been retrieved by South Korean soldiers and police, but it was not immediately clear how the mines ended up drifting into the South.  The explosion was reported shortly before midnight Saturday in a restricted border area in Yeoncheon, 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Seoul, the defence ministry said.A 48-year-old man died and a 25-year-old man was seriously injured.  “Han was killed by one of the North Korean wooden box mines which had drifted south along the border river,” a ministry spokesman told AFP.

South Korean soldiers and police have retrieved 29 boxes of North Korean mines in their joint search which began on Friday along all streams connected to the Imjin River, he said, of which 18 boxes were empty.  [AFP]

Separately, UPI reports that the South Koreans have found several more North Korean-manufactured mines on “small South Korean islands near the Yellow Sea border:”

The military launched a search after a fisherman reported finding an anti-personnel mine Friday on Jumin Island, just south of the border, Yonhap News Agency said. The other mines were discovered on Jumin and two neighboring islands.  [UPI]

The Russians have been manufacturing box mines since at least World War II.  The PMD series is still in common use by many armies today, including the North Korean army.  Numerous counties now manufacture local variants.  Because they use very little metal, PMD’s are very difficult to detect.

Time and time again, reading news stories involving military affairs becomes a source of frustration because so many reporters don’t know anything about the subject matter and don’t do some simple research.  My favorite example comes via the AP’s professional atrocity mongerer Charles J. Hanley, who wrote about the magnesium flares that helicopters over Sadr city spat out as a defensive measure against heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, and who out of misunderstanding or malice made it sound as though the U.S. Army was napalming the crowds.  In this case, it’s unclear whether the troops found empty boxes for the storage of multiple mines — one inference of which is that North Korean troops crossed the DMZ to plant mines — or whether the boxes were simply empty and buoyant PMD boxes from which the explosives had tipped out (which seems more likely to me, even if I put nothing past the North Koreans).

I wonder if the Kyonggi provincial government is finally ready to take a tip that this isn’t the best time for hiking the DMZ after all.

Update:   I see that GI Korea’s post on this has a picture of the explosive, and he seems to suspect that this was deliberate.  Well, again, anything is possible with the North Koreans, so we’ll have to see, but if these mines are buoyant, then this is going to be hard to pin on Kim Jong Il.  I would only plead with the South Korean government to establish some very strict message discipline about this, so that the Democratic Party conspiracy machine won’t have so much fodder next time around.