SOUTH KOREA: The South Korean navy rained shells down on a North Korean patrol boat during a sea battle but did not sink it to avoid provoking an all-out war, top military officers said yesterday.
The peninsula came perilously close to a full-blown conflict as South Korea marked the end of the World Cup tournament which it has co-hosted over the past month with Japan, they warned.
Gen Lee Nam-shin, the South's most senior soldier, apologised for the navy's failure to sink the North Korean patrol boat during Saturday's clash in the Yellow Sea when he appeared before an emergency parliamentary committee a few hours later.
A South Korean patrol vessel was hit and sank as it was being towed away.
Four sailors were killed, one was missing and 19 were wounded, according to the latest toll, which has caused widespread anger in the South.
"We exercised self-restraint to stop the skirmish from escalating into an all-out war which could devastate the Korean peninsula," the commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told the parliamentary committee.
The 1950-53 Korean War has never been officially ended with a formal peace treaty, and more than one million soldiers are deployed along the inter-Korean border.
The general gave no more details, but Seoul newspapers said South Korean warships and fighter jets on standby were ordered to hold back.
Another top JCS officer, Maj Gen Ahn Ki-seok, said experts had estimated that at least 30 North Korean sailors were killed or wounded.
"Our formation leader said he saw hundreds of rounds of ammunition flying toward a North Korean patrol boat and most of North Korean sailors operating the ship's guns being knocked down," he told a press briefing.
"The 70mm and 40mm guns installed on our patrol vessels have high accuracy as they are computer-operated. We therefore believe the North's casualties number more than 30."
He said the North Korean boat was engulfed by flames after being bombarded by hundreds of shells from other South Korean boats.
But he also said South Korean vessels refrained from destroying the North Korean boat, which was in flames as it headed back into its own territory.
"It would not have been difficult for us to sink the vessel, but we had to take the World Cup into consideration," he said.
"If we had sunk the boat, North Korea would have almost certainly fired a guided missile from the coast and then it would have escalated into an all-out war."
The 20-minute skirmish in disputed waters off the west coast came as the World Cup football tournament drew to a close in South Korea and Japan.
South Korea has demanded an apology from the North, saying that the patrol boat crossed the unofficial sea border and then opened fire after being warned. The North has accused the South of opening fire first.
"They seemed to come at us with the intention of doing it," Mr Lee Hae-Yong, a chief petty officer on the sunken patrol ship, was quoted as saying by the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper.