SEOUL: South Korean activists launched tens of thousands of anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border into North Korea on Thursday, denouncing its latest nuclear test and defying threats of retaliation.
The leaflets, criticizing leader Kim Jong-Un for putting nuclear weapons before the wellbeing of his people, were launched with helium balloons from the border city of Paju.
The propaganda exercise, organized by North Korean defector-turned-activist Park Sang-Hak, came amid surging military tensions on the divided Korean peninsula following the North’s fifth and largest-ever nuclear test last week.
Hours before the balloon launch was scheduled to begin, the North’s official KCNA news agency published a commentary describing Park as “human scum without an equal in the world.”
KCNA said the balloon launch was a desperate response to the success of last week’s test, and a bid by Seoul to “stoke confrontation” over the holiday period.
The launch came in the middle of the three-day Chuseok harvest festival holiday — celebrated on both sides of the border.
Conservative South Korean activists, including many North Korean defectors, have been carrying out leafleting exercises using giant helium balloons for years — a practice that infuriates Pyongyang, which has threatened military strikes in response.
Park Sang-Hak said strong winds at the border had restricted Thursday’s event to the launch of around 150,000 leaflets — half the planned number.
“We are doing this to inform the 20 million starving people in North Korea of the truth,” Park said.
“At this moment, when hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from terrible floods, Kim Jong-Un conducted another nuclear test.
“So, who is calling who ‘human scum?’” he said.
North Korean state media has described ongoing floods as the worst to hit the country since World War II.
According to a UN agency report, 138 people have died and 400 are missing after torrential rains caused devastation in the country’s far north.
Activists launch leaflets into N. Korea after nuclear test
Activists launch leaflets into N. Korea after nuclear test
Germany’s Merz urges ‘peaceful coexistence’ a year after deadly market attack
- The market attack happened during campaigning for legislative elections — one of several carried out by migrants that fed into a fierce debate about immigration and security in Germany
MAGDEBURG, Germany: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Saturday called for “peaceful coexistence” as the country marked the first anniversary of a deadly car-ramming attack at a Christmas market in eastern Germany.
Merz addressed a church ceremony in the city of Magdeburg, where the December 20, 2024, attack killed six and wounded more than 300 others.
“May we all find, today in this commemoration, comfort and peaceful coexistence, especially as Christmas approaches,” he told those gathered at the Protestant Johanniskirche (St. John’s Church), near the site of the attack.
Germany was still “a country where we show unconditional solidarity — especially when injustice prevails — standing shoulder to shoulder wherever violence erupts,” he added.
While the market reopened on November 20, guarded by armed police and protected by concrete barricades, it remained closed on Saturday out of respect to the victims of last year’s attack.
Saudi man Taleb Jawad Al-Abdulmohsen, 51, is currently on trial for the attack. He has admitted to plowing a rented SUV through the crowd in an attack prosecutors say was inspired by a mix of personal grievances, far-right and anti-Islam views.
Merz’s speech came eight months before regional elections, with the far-right AfD riding high in opinion polls in Saxony-Anhalt state, of which Magdeburg is the capital.
The market attack happened during campaigning for legislative elections — one of several carried out by migrants that fed into a fierce debate about immigration and security in Germany.
On December 13, German police said they had arrested five men suspected of planning a similar vehicle attack on a Christmas market in the southern state of Bavaria.
Police and prosecutors said they had detained an Egyptian, three Moroccans and a Syrian over the alleged plot.
