Daily US Times: North Korea said it will completely cut communications with the South, including a hotline between the two nation’s leaders.
Describing South Korea as “the enemy”, the North said this was the first in a series of actions.
Daily calls, which have been made to a liaison office located in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, will cease from Tuesday.
The two countries technically still at war because no peace agreement was reached when the Korean War ended in 1953.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report said, North Korea “will completely cut off and shut down the liaison line between the authorities of the North and the South, which has been maintained through the North-South joint liaison office… from 12:00 on 9 June 2020.”
Military communications channels will also be cut, it said.
When the liaison office was temporarily closed in January because of Covid-19 restrictions, contact between the two states was maintained by phone.
The two countries made two phone calls a day through the office, at 09:00 and 17:00.
South Korea said on Monday that for the first time in 21 months, its morning call had gone unanswered, although contact was made in the afternoon.
KNCA – the North’s state broadcaster – said: “We have reached a conclusion that there is no need to sit face-to-face with the south Korean authorities and there is no issue to discuss with them, as they have only aroused our dismay.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong threatened last week to close the office unless South Korea stopped defector groups from sending leaflets into the North.
South Korea did not make any official comments about the halt of communications.
She said the leaflet campaign was a hostile act that violated the peace agreements made during the 2018 Panmunjom summit between the South’s President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un.
North Korean defectors occasionally send balloons carrying leaflets critical of the communist region into the North, sometimes with supplies to entice North Koreans to pick them up.
The people of North Kore can only get news from state-controlled media, and most do not have access to the internet.
Relations between the South and North appeared to improve in 2018, when the leaders of both countries met three times. Such high and state-level meetings had not taken place in over a decade.
But the North largely cut off contact with the South following the collapse of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim in Hanoi last year that left nuclear talks at a standstill.
The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-1953 Korean war ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
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