N.Korea detains four S.Korean ´trespassers´

A Seoul activist told AFP that the four had reportedly crossed the border from China in an attempt to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

SEOUL, February 26, 2010 (AFP) - North Korea said Friday it had detained four South Koreans for illegal entry a day after tensions rose over Seoul's joint military exercises with the United States.

A Seoul activist told AFP that the four, whom he suspected were Christian evangelists, had reportedly crossed the border from China in an attempt to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

South Korea could not confirm the reported arrests but said it was checking the safety of more than 1,000 of its citizens currently working in or visiting the hardline communist state.

"A relevant institution of the DPRK (North Korea) recently detained four South Koreans who illegally entered it. They are now under investigation by the institution," Pyongyang's official news agency said.

Its English-language report, headlined "South Korean Trespassers Detained," gave no further details.

It was the third time in two months that the North has reported an illegal border crossing. One of the cases involved a US missionary on a human rights crusade.

Activist Choi Sung-Yong, quoting his informants in China, said the four crossed the border between China's Tumen city and Namyang in the North several days ago.

"They told North Korean soldiers that they came there to see Kim Jong-Il," said Choi, who campaigns to bring back South Koreans abducted by the North in previous decades and has contacts there.

Choi said he suspected the four may have been Christian evangelists but added that he was seeking further information.

US missionary Robert Park walked into the North across the frozen Tumen river from China on December 25 to draw attention to Pyongyang's human rights abuses.

He was freed on February 6 after expressing what the North described as "sincere repentance."

Pyongyang has said it is also holding an unidentified American arrested for illegal entry from China on January 25. That person's motives are unknown and US officials have not confirmed the detention.

North Korea has in recent months been making peace overtures to the South but military tensions persist.

On Thursday the North's military accused South Korea and the United States of planning a surprise attack and warned it could respond with atomic weapons.

It described a major US-South Korean military exercise due to start next month as "pilot operations and nuclear war exercises" aimed at mounting a surprise preemptive attack on the North.

The military said it would retaliate for any attack "with our powerful military counteraction, and if necessary, mercilessly destroy the bulwark of aggression by mobilising all the offensive and defensive means including nuclear deterrent".

Diplomatic efforts are intensifying to bring the North back to six-nation nuclear disarmament talks.

US envoy Stephen Bosworth left for Japan Friday after talks in China and South Korea aimed at reviving the dialogue, which groups the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan.

The North has set two conditions for returning to the long-running talks it abandoned last April, a month before staging a second nuclear test.

It calls for UN sanctions to be lifted and wants a US commitment to discuss a formal peace pact, replacing the armistice which ended the 1950-53 war on the Korean peninsula.

Bosworth told reporters before departing that the United States is willing to start talks with North Korea about a peace treaty but it must first return to the nuclear negotiations.