North Korea has warned South Korea it might scrap their joint-venture industrial zone if Seoul links the project to sanctions over the North’s rocket launch in December, a report said on Thursday.
The Kaesong Industrial Complex, on the North Korean side of the border, is the flagship economic link between the two Koreas.
It hosts more than 120 South Korean companies which employ 53,000 North Koreans producing labour-intensive products such as garments, footwear and kitchen utensils.
Having started production in late 2004, the symbol of reconciliation has remained largely immune to the fluctuations of inter-Korean ties including the 2010 shelling of a South Korean island.
But the North reacted sharply after Seoul’s Unification Ministry said on Monday it would tighten inspection of industrial parts and materials going to Kaesong to reflect the latest UN Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang.
“If anyone touches Kaesong, even to the slightest degree and in whatever form, we would take it as a vicious sanction against us,” a spokesman for the North’s National Economic Cooperation Committee said in a statement.