North Korea Fires Rockets at Island

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703904804575631763523837910.html?mod=wsj_share_twitterBy EVAN RAMSTAD And JAEYEON WOO

SEOUL—North Korea fired artillery rockets at South Korea's Yeonpyeong island near a disputed maritime border Tuesday, setting houses on fire in its small villages, and prompting the south to return fire and dispatch fighter jets to the area.

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Associated Press

Smoke billowed from Yeonpyeong island on Tuesday.

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One South Korean Marine was killed in the skirmish and at least a dozen more were injured, military officials said.
Photos sent to South Korean TV stations by residents of nearby So-yeonpyeong island showed multiple plumes of smoke rising over its larger neighbor.
A spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chief of Staff said "scores of rounds" were fired by the North.
"The whole neighborhood is on fire," said Na Young-ok, a 46-year-old woman who has lived on the island for 20 years. She was at a bomb shelter when reached by The Wall Street Journal. "I think countless houses are on fire, but no fire truck is coming. We have a fire station but the shots are intermittently coming."
Ms. Na said a military base on the island was on fire. She said she was with about 50 people in the shelter and her child was in a similar shelter at the school on the island. She didn't know whether people were injured.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak convened an emergency meeting of defense and security-related agencies. He ordered senior officials to "carefully manage the situation to prevent the escalation of the clash," a spokeswoman said.

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AFP/Getty Images

A May 2009 view from Yeonpyeong island shows a North Korean flotilla: fishing boats and one navy patrol craft.

Some units of the South Korean military had been training in waters near the two islands earlier and North Korea complained this week about the exercise, the spokeswoman said. "We're examining a possible link" between the complaint and the attack, the spokeswoman said.
The artillery—more than 50 rounds, according to island residents speaking on South Korea's YTN television—was fired from positions south of the North Korean city of Haeju.
The attack started at 2:34 p.m. local time. Electricity was cut off on the island and people moved to bomb shelters, residents told YTN.
About 1,200 people live on the island, which is just 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, south of the tip of North Korea's south coast.
The attack is the second by North Korea this year against South Korea in the disputed maritime border area of the Yellow Sea. In March, a North Korean submarine torpedoed and sank a South Korean warship near an island about west of the island that was hit on Tuesday.
The Yeonpyeong islands are the eastern-most of five small islands that within close-firing range of North Korea. All are just a few kilometers away from the maritime border known in Sotuh Korea as the Northern Limit Line, or NLL, that was drawn up by the United Nations after the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The North has objected to the line since the early 1970s, arguing in part that the line forces its ships to take lengthy detours to international shipping lanes. Its objections intensified in the 1990s and led to two deadly skirmishes in the area in 1999 and 2002.
In 2007, leaders of the two Koreas agreed to turn the area into a "peace zone." That vaguely-worded agreement was struck just ahead of a South Korean election by an outgoing government and never implemented. It was interpreted in North Korea as erasing the maritime border and in the South as keeping it.
—Jung-ah Lee and In-soo Nam contributed to this article. Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com

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