Koreas: South Begins Removing Mines, Expects North To Do Same

Local Editor

South Korean troops on Monday entered the heavily fortified border with the North to remove mines under tension-reducing agreements reached last month.

Meanwhile, South Korea expressed that it is expecting North Korea to begin its own demining as well.

The development came amid renewed international diplomacy on North Korea's nuclear weapons program after weeks of stalemated negotiations.

Relatively, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to visit Pyongyang this month to try to set up a second summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In further details, units of South Korean army engineers with demining equipment were deployed to the border village of Panmunjom and another frontline area called "Arrow Head Hill" where the Koreas plan their first joint searches for soldiers killed during the 1950-53 Korean War.

The troops will try to remove mines on the southern parts of the two sites while North Korea is required to do the same on their northern sides.

In the "Arrow Head Hill," where some of the fiercest battles during the Korean War happened, Seoul officials believe there are remains of about 300 South Korean and UN forces along with an unspecified number of Chinese and North Korean remains.

The Korean War left millions dead or missing, and South Korea wants to expand joint excavations with North Korea.

The Koreas remain split along the 248-kilometer-long Demilitarized Zone that was originally created as a buffer zone at the end of the Korean War.

About 2 million mines are believed to be peppered inside and near the DMZ, which is also guarded by hundreds of thousands of combat troops, barbed wire fences and tank traps on both sides.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team