SEOUL — North Korea denied Friday planting land mines that maimed two South Korean soldiers near their guard post last week.
Three land mines that the South said were manufactured by North Korea exploded Aug. 4 when the two soldiers stepped on them just outside their post inside the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating large contingents of the two countries’ armies. One soldier lost both legs, and the other lost one leg.
On Monday, the South and the US-led UN Command said that a joint investigation had concluded that the mines had been planted by North Korean troops. As evidence, they presented the debris of wooden-box land mines used by the North Korean military.
On Friday, the North called those findings “nonsense” and accused South Korea of using stray North Korean mines it had collected from the buffer zone to fabricate the incident to drive up military tension. It challenged the South to provide more persuasive evidence that the mines had been planted by North Korea.
“If the same mines had exploded in the heart of Seoul, are they still going to insist that our troops went and planted them there?” a North Korean spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The South Korean military said Friday that the North’s military had sent a denial across the border by phone. The South, as it had earlier, vowed “severe retaliation.”
The mine explosions worsened already chilly relations between the two Koreas. The South turned on loudspeakers on the border with the North, blaring broadcasts that included harsh criticism of the North Korean government.