Kim Yo Jong says North Korea will switch border loudspeakers back on; Seoul calls threats 'intolerable'

North Korea will turn its propaganda loudspeakers back on along the entire border with South Korea before the end of the month, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on Wednesday, in a fresh sign that ties between the two Koreas are getting worse.

She made the announcement after touring frontline areas where North Korean soldiers have been laying mines, stringing barbed wire and putting up anti-tank barriers. “Within October, the loudspeakers for psychological warfare against the ROK will be in operation along the whole border,” she said, according to the state news agency KCNA. She called the fortification work a “sacred and great undertaking”.

She also warned that North Korean border guards “will show no mercy for the armed gangsters bereft of reason”, a reference to the warning shots South Korean troops fire when Northern soldiers cross the military demarcation line. Seoul says that has happened 50 times this year. Marshal Pak Jong Chon, a senior military official who joined her, called the South’s claims “deliberate, premeditated and absurd” and said: “Our army knows where our borderline is better than any others.”

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Jin Yong-sung, called the threats “intolerable” and ordered the military to “sternly respond” to any provocation. Seoul has formally blamed North Korean mines for blasts on 21 September that injured three of its frontline soldiers, and has asked Pyongyang to apologise and clear the remaining mines. The North denies responsibility.

President Lee Jae Myung’s government switched off the South’s own loudspeakers after he took office last year, and the North stopped its broadcasts soon after. Restarting them would undo one of the few easing steps between the two sides since Kim Jong Un declared the South a permanent enemy.