South Koreans Send Anti-Pyongyang Leaflets Across Border

South Korean activists launched propaganda leaflets against North Korea Monday, a week after the North threatened military action over a similar exercise.

A group of about a dozen activists launched seven balloons carrying 50,000 leaflets from a park in the border town of Paju, north of Seoul, in the presence of some 100 police officers, news agencies reported.

Some residents gathered to protest the balloon launch fearing reaction from Pyongyang but one of the activists, Choi Woo-won dismissed the North’s warning as “empty threats.”

"Paju residents can't live properly due to worries. They come here way too frequently,'' a local shop owner, Kim Bok-nam, told Reuters.

''Last time the North warned to directly strike here, so we came to protest since we can't tolerate it anymore.''

The leaflets urged North Koreans to rise up against their new leader Kim Jong-Un with pictures of fallen world leaders including Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.

Activists, including North Korean defectors, have on several occasions in the past sent leaflets across the border irking North Korean leadership.

Last week, following Pyongyang’s threat to fire on South Korean territory if activists went ahead with a launch, South Korea thwarted the launch with the military put in a state of alert and hundreds of residents in the border region evacuated.

South Koreans fear Pyongyang may initiate military strike ahead of South’s presidential election in December.

The 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War, killing more than one million including 41,000 Americans, falls next July.