SEOUL—Hundreds of South Korean tourists vacated a mountain resort in the North on Saturday, a day after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a 53-year-old woman vacationer who wandered into a military zone in the area.
The incident comes after ties between the states, technically still at war, chilled in recent months and as South Korea's new president, who has advocated taking a tough line with Pyongyang, repeated calls for dialogue.
"It is incomprehensible to shoot and kill a civilian tourist incapable of resistance during a time when it's possible to make out (objects) with his naked eyes," President Lee was quoted as saying in an emergency ministerial meeting.
"Swift action should be taken to investigate the incident, and follow-up measures should also be drawn up," he said, calling for the North to cooperate in the investigation.
A North Korean spokesman put the blame on the South and demanded an apology for what it called an incident of trespassing in a restricted military area.
"The South side should be held responsible for the incident, make clear apology to the North side and take measures against the recurrence of (a) similar incident," the North's official KCNA news agency quoted the spokesman as saying.
After the shooting on Friday, South Korea suspended tourism to the Mount Kumgang resort, located a few kilometres north of the heavily fortified border on the east coast.
The South Korean affiliate of the Hyundai Group that runs the resort has been shuttling tourists back to the South since Friday.
"There were 1,362 tourists in Mount Kumgang and we expect 1,012 of them to return to the South today," said an official with resort operator Hyundai Asan.
Medical authorities said the victim, Park Wang-ja, was shot once in the chest and once in her buttocks.
Park, the wife of a retired policeman, had left her hotel to watch the sunrise over the sea at the beach, fellow travellers told local media.
She had apparently strayed past fenced-off resort grounds and was shot by a North Korean sentry in the pre-dawn hours of Friday when she entered the military zone, South Korean government officials said.
An eyewitness, also at the beach to see the sunrise, told local media Park passed by him and after awhile he heard two gun shots with 10-second intervals and a scream.
"I heard a scream, which made me turn left, and I saw a person collapse while three (North Korean) soldiers ran out from the mountain," Lee In-bok, a witness to the scene and also touring Mount Kumgang at the time, told YTN TV.
"Soldiers nudged the fallen person by their feet but I never thought (that person) was a tourist," Lee added.
South Korea is conducting an investigation and looking into North Korean claims a sentry shouted at Park to halt, and fired a warning shot before killing the housewife.
"When a serviceman spotted her and ordered her to stop, she did not obey the order but began to run away," the North Korean spokesman quoted by KCNA said. "The serviceman could not but open fire at her."
The spokesman rejected the South's plan to send a team of investigators, the KCNA dispatch said.
Communist state takes cut
"Park was very gentle and kind," Chae Young-soon, a neighbour, told local reporters.
The North Korean resort, opened in 1998, has been visited by almost 2 million South Koreans. Park is the first South Korean tourist killed by a North Korean, a government official said.
The resort has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to impoverished North Korea with tourists paying a fee to enter the country and the communist state taking a cut on food, lodging and recreation expenses paid by tourists.
Before the incident was made public on Friday, President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February, repeated a call to the North to return to inter-Korean discussions.
Pyongyang has called Lee "a traitor to the nation" for cutting off what had been a free flow of aid and seeking to tie Seoul's largesse to progress the North makes in disarmament.
In April, North Korea said it was stopping dialogue with its wealthy neighbour, despite Lee's calls to tone down heated rhetoric and get back to serious talks.
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