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SEOUL - SOUTH Korean activists said on Wednesday they plan to float about 100,000 leaflets into communist North Korea next week, despite threats from Pyongyang that to do so threatens a military confrontation.
The leaflets contain messages criticising North leader Kim Jong Il, describing him as a murderous dictator and calling for an end to his rule.
The new plan was disclosed one day after the North warned of a possible inter-Korean military clash in an angry protest to what it calls 'psychological warfare' by South Koreans.
Mr Choi Sung Young, leader of the South Korean families of those abducted by Pyongyang, said his group plans to float about 100,000 leaflets into the North from fishing boats in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) on October 27.
He said his group and its partner organisation of former North Korean defectors, the Fighters for Free North Korea (FFNK), had another 200,000 leaflets ready to fly northward at a later date.
The FFNK released 10 large balloons loaded with 100,000 leaflets from a fishing boat near the border in the Yellow Sea on October 10.
'We urge the North Korean leadership to cooperate with locating the abductees, and also we want North Korean residents to know what their leaders did to southern brothers,' Mr Choi told AFP.
Each leaflet contains a detailed list of South Korean abductees held in North Korea, including 436 fishermen, he said.
He also said the leaflet calls Northern leader Kim a 'tyrant' or 'dictator' who suffers from a paralysis following an alleged stroke.
By official count 494 South Koreans were seized in the Cold War decades following the 1950-53 Korean conflict. More than 500 prisoners of war were never sent home in 1953.
North Korea denies holding any South Koreans against their will, though some have managed to escape and come to the South.
The North's government-published daily Minju Joson warned on Tuesday the spreading of the leaflets could trigger accidental border clashes which could develop into a full-scale military confrontation.
'There is no doubt the military confrontation ... will expand into a new war, a nuclear war, and the entire nation will suffer from the damage,' it said.
Pyongyang had earlier warned that South Koreans must stop the leaflets or risk expulsion from a Seoul-funded industrial zone in North Korea.
Seoul's Unification Ministry and South Korean firms operating in a joint industrial zone in the North's Kaesong city near the border have asked civic groups to refrain from floating the leaflets. -- AFP
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