Kim Jong Un's sister jeers South Korean security chiefs They are "worse than dogs"

Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s leader, mocked Seoul’s ability to detect weapons launches, claiming that military leaders across the border were no better at security than dogs.

“I cannot but say that [South Korean] people are very pitiful as they entrust security to such blind persons and offer huge taxes to them,” The Times quotes her as saying.

“It is better ten times to entrust security to a dog with a developed sense of hearing and smell.”

South Korea accused its northern neighbour of firing artillery shells near the tense sea boundary for a third day straight on January 7. Kim said North Korea “did not fire even a single shell into the relevant waters”, according to state media.

Instead, the North detonated “blasting powder simulating the sound of 130mm coastal artillery” dozens of times to test the South’s military detection capabilities, she said. “They misjudged the blasting sound as the sound of gunfire and conjectured it as a provocation,” she added. “The ridiculous behaviour of these puppets in military uniform is nothing new today.”

South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff dismissed her statement as “comedy-like, vulgar propaganda” meant to undermine trust in the military and stoke divisions.

Kim Yo-jong is one of the closet aides to her older brother, Kim Jong-un, and often serves as a spokeswoman on relations with the South. She can be extremely direct in her criticisms — in 2020 she described anti-Kim activists in the South as “mongrel dogs” and “human scum little short of wild animals”.

In response to the artillery fire on January 5, the South Korean military conducted live-fire exercises on frontline islands near the zone for the first time since the two countries’ 2018 agreement. South Korea’s Yonhap News carried a photo of what it said was open gun ports on a North Korean island facing Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island on the front line.

Kim warned that any mistakes by South Korean leaders would endanger their capital Seoul, home to ten million people and only an hour’s drive from the inter-Korean land border. “I make myself clear once again that the safety catch of [the] trigger of the KPA [Korean People’s Army] had already been slipped,” she said.

A South Korean military official was quoted by Yonhap as saying: “Kim Yo-jong appears to have announced a false statement as [she] was surprised by our military’s detection capabilities. North Korea’s artillery firing [on Saturday] was also detected by our military’s detection assets.”

Tensions have been escalating along the Korean Demilitarised Zone, one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. The latest provocations come after South Korea and the US held week-long mechanised infantry drills near the border that involved South Korean army K1A2 tanks. Pyongyang called the exercises “reckless war provocations” and said the allies were bringing the region to the brink of “an inferno of nuclear war”.