NORTH KOREA: NORTH KOREA has vowed to adopt a strong military stance at the Mount Geumgang resort, as tensions between the two Koreas ratcheted up after the shooting of a South Korean tourist there by a North Korean soldier last month.
Pyongyang has accused South Korea's president Lee Myung Bak of blaming the communist nation for the shooting of 53-year-old tourist Park Wang Ja on July 11th, after she strayed into a forbidden zone.
South Korea suspended tours to the resort on the eastern coast after the shooting and the North has repeated requests from Seoul to let its own investigators visit Mount Geumgang and survey the site.
The two Koreas are still technically at war, since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended without a formal peace treaty. Both sides now face each other across the last great Cold War barrier, the demilitarised zone, where 1.7 million soldiers face each other every day.
"We will take strong military counter-actions against even the slightest hostile actions in the tourist resort in the area," the Korea Central News Agency said in a statement, quoting the local North Korean army units stationed there.
North Korea described South Korea's decision to suspend the tours as "an intolerable insult" and demanded an apology, saying it would expel "unnecessary" South Korean staff from the resort.
Pyongyang blames South Korea for the incident, saying its soldier had "no choice but to shoot" because Ms Park entered a restricted military zone near the resort.
South Korean firm Hyundai Asan Corp began running tours to the site 10 years ago and the shooting was the first incident at the site. The Hyundai unit has around 300 South Koreans on-site.
Pyongyang also hiked up the rhetoric against Lee Myung Bak. Since Mr Lee took office this year, relations have cooled over his promises to closely monitor economic dealings with the North.
"Traitor Lee is kicking up all these rackets, absurdly linking the incident that occurred due to the intruder's mistake with the "vital right of people" and hyping and falsifying the incident.
"Lee Myung Bak is driving the frozen inter-Korean relations to a catastrophic phase," the statement ran.
