North Korea threatens to launch ‘mountain’ of propaganda leaflets across border as South Korea tensions escalate

State media trails ‘large-scale distribution’ of flyers days after blowing up intra-Korean liaison office

Kim Jong-un loyalists are preparing to bombard neighbouring South Korea with propaganda leaflets, North Korea’s state news agency has said, as tensions between the two countries continue to seethe.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency said citizens “are actively pushing forward with the preparations for launching a large-scale distribution of leaflets” across the border.

The flyers set to be blasted towards Seoul are currently in a stockpile that stands as tall as a mountain, the official broadcaster claimed.

“Every action should be met with proper reaction and only when one experiences it oneself, one can feel how offending it is,” it said.

South Korea has likewise been firing leaflets northwards in recent days in an effort to debunk claims by Pyongyang, an action that North Korea blamed on disgruntled defectors as it threatened to launch military action against its neighbour.

On Tuesday, Mr Kim’s regime blew up an inter-Korean liaison office to express its displeasure over the defectors’ leaflet campaign and at South Korea for not stopping them, calling the country “a mongrel dog”.

South Korea’s unification ministry, which is responsible for inter-Korean dialogue, said on Saturday that North Korea’s planned leaflet onslaught was “extremely regrettable” and urged it to cast aside the idea immediately.

One group of North Korean defectors said on Friday that they had scrapped a plan to throw hundreds of plastic bottles stuffed with rice, medicine and face masks into the sea near the border on Sunday in the hope that they would wash up on North Korea’s beaches and relieve local demand.

Other defector organisations have previously dispatched packages of food, dollar bills, mini-radios and even USB sticks containing South Korean TV dramas and news broadcasts, usually delivered by balloon or in bottles ferried by river.

The two countries are still technically at war because the 1950-53 armed conflict between them concluded without a peace treaty being signed. They have waged information campaigns against each other for decades, although an official South Korean programme dropping leaflets across the demilitarised zone ended in 2010.

Additional reporting by Reuters