N. Korea threatens strikes over SKorea propaganda broadcasts

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday threatened to attack South Korean loudspeakers that are broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda messages across their shared border, the world's most heavily armed.

The warning follows Pyongyang's earlier denial that it had planted land mines on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone that injured two South Korean soldiers last week. Seoul retaliated for those injuries by restarting the loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts for the first time in 11 years and suggested more actions could follow.

The authoritarian North is extremely sensitive about external insults of its leader, Kim Jong Un, and tries to isolate its people from any criticism or suggestions that the leadership is anything other than powerful and revered.

North Korea's army said in a statement that the broadcasts are equivalent to a declaration of war and that a failure to immediately stop them and take down the loudspeakers would result in "an all-out military action of justice to blow up all means for 'anti-north psychological warfare'" on the front lines.

Such bombast isn't unusual and this is not the first time Pyongyang has threatened to attack its enemies. Seoul is often warned that it will be reduced to a "sea of fire" if it doesn't do as the North bids, and Washington and Seoul were both threatened with nuclear annihilation in the months after Kim Jong Un took power in late 2011.

Pyongyang's threats are rarely backed up, although the North did launch an artillery attack in 2010 that killed four South Koreans. Later that year, a Seoul-led international investigation blamed a North Korean torpedo for a warship sinking that killed 46 South Koreans.

On Friday, responding to the allegations by Seoul and the U.S.-led U.N. Command that North Korean soldiers buried the land mine explosions that took both legs from one soldier and one leg from another, North Korea's powerful National Defense Commission argued that Seoul fabricated the evidence and demanded video evidence to support the argument that Pyongyang was responsible.

Officials said the mine planting violates the armistice that stopped fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War, which still technically continues because there has never been a formal peace treaty.