Korean border troops verify removal of each other’s posts
Dozens of North and South Korean soldiers crossed over the world’s most heavily armed border Wednesday as they inspected the sites of their rival’s front-line guard posts to verify they’d been removed, part of inter-Korean engagement efforts that come amid stalled U.S.-North Korea nuclear disarmament talks.
Soldiers from the two Koreas exchanged cigarettes and chatted as they inspected the dismantlement or disarmament of 22 guard posts — 11 from each country — inside the Demilitarized Zone that forms their 248-kilometre (155-mile) -long, 4-kilometre (2.5-mile) -wide border.
The inspections Wednesday were mostly symbolic — the removals will leave South Korea with about 50 other DMZ posts and North Korea with 150, according to defence experts in South Korea — but they mark an extraordinary change in ties from last year, when North Korea tested a series of increasingly powerful weapons and threatened Seoul and Washington with war.
A small group of journalists was allowed to enter the zone to watch a South Korean team leave for a North Korean guard post Wednesday morning and a North Korean team come to a South Korean guard post later in the day.