By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea told the North on Friday to immediately withdraw a threat it made against the South's commercial airliners that has forced them to stop flying near the airspace of the communist neighbour.
North Korea, which is preparing to test its longest-range Taepodong-2 missile, said on Thursday it could not guarantee the safety of the South's commercial flights off the east coast of the peninsula, where the missile base is located.
It linked the warning to next week's joint U.S.-South Korea military drills, which start on Monday and have been held for years without major incident. The prickly North regularly criticises them as a prelude to invasion and nuclear war.
"Threatening civilian airliners' normal operations under international aviation regulations is not only against the international rules but is an act against humanity," South Korea's Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said.
"The government urges the North to immediately withdraw the military threat against civilian airliners," Kim said.
Kim said the South's Korean Air and Asiana Airlines had been immediately notified of the threat following the North's announcement. The airliners responded by diverting flights that approach the country from the east, he said.
Kim said about 33 daily flights approached the South from the east with about 15 of them by South Korean airliners.
Japan Airlines, All Nippon Airways and Air China said they had no plans to alter their flight paths.
The area would likely be in the flight path of the missile, which spy satellites indicate is still in an assembly facility. It takes North Korea at least a week to prepare the missile for flight after setting it vertically and moving to a launch pad, experts have said.
North Korea has said it is preparing to launch a satellite as part of its peaceful space programme. South Korean officials said they see no difference between a satellite and missile launch because they use the same technology and the same rocket.
"We've become quite used to our northern neighbour's threats. Its overall impact on airlines is limited," said Suh Jin-hee, an analyst at SK Securities in Seoul.
MILITARY TALKS
North Korean generals met the U.S.-led United Nations command on Friday for about 45 minutes of military talks at the Panmunjom truce village in the Demilitarised Zone, the U.N. command said.
The U.N delegation, that included officers from the United States, South Korea, Britain and New Zealand, urged North Korea not to take any provocative actions and criticised the threat made to commercial aircraft, it said in a news release.
The U.N. command told the North that the threat "was entirely inappropriate, had raised concern in the international aviation community and should be retracted immediately," it said.
The two sides had their first such meeting in about seven years on Monday and the North, which requested the talks, complained about U.S. military moves near the border and live-fire joint training, South Korean officials said.
Separately, the United States has sent Stephen Bosworth, its new special envoy for North Korea, to the region this week for talks on halting any moves by Pyongyang viewed as provocative and coaxing the country back into faltering nuclear disarmament talks. Bosworth will visit Seoul at the weekend.
Bosworth told Japanese officials in Tokyo he would like to visit the North soon and warned Pyongyang not to proceed with a missile launch, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.
The two Koreas are technically still at war and station about 1 million troops near their respective sides of the Demilitarised Zone buffer that has divided the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire, but not a peace treaty.
(Additional reporting by Park Jung-youn and the Tokyo bureau; Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Alex Richardson)
