North Korea Makes New Threats Against Activist Group Releasing Balloons

It seems that North Korea is very serious about stopping the Fighters for A Free North Korea from releasing balloons with copies of “The Interview” on it:

North Korea on Sunday renewed its threats against a South Korean civic group’s plan to send anti-Pyongyang fliers across the border via balloon, warning it will use “all the firepower strike means” to destroy them.

The message, posted as an open notice by the frontline units of the North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA), came about a week after a leading activist in Seoul reaffirmed his intent to scatter materials criticizing the communist regime across the border around March 26.

The date marks the 5th anniversary of Pyongyang’s torpedoing of the South Korean corvette Cheonan.

Park Sang-hak, head of the activist group, said earlier this month he and other North Korean defectors would release balloons holding 500,000 leaflets, as well as DVDs of the U.S. film “The Interview,” a comedy depicting a fictitious assassination of the North’s leader Kim Jong-un.

According to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the KPA’s open notice said the campaign “deliberately (escalates) tension on the Korean peninsula where the situation has reached the brink of war” on top of the annual Seoul-Washington military drills that kicked off March 2.

Should the campaign be carried out, the North’s frontline army will “blow up” the balloons with “all the firepower strike means,” it said, adding that any countermeasures will “entail double and treble merciless retaliatory strikes.”

In October the two Koreas exchanged gunfire after the North attempted to shoot down balloons carrying similar leaflets. South Korea suffered no casualties or property damage.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the group should just secretly fly the balloons across the border so the North Koreans do not have a chance to retaliate against them if they are dead set on doing this.