Kim Jong Un holds security meeting as Seoul says roads destroyed

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has held a security meeting following what Pyongyang says were incursions by South Korean drones across the border, its state media reported on Tuesday amid a pickup in tensions between the two countries.

At the Monday meeting, Kim Jong Un was briefed on "the case of enemy's serious provocation that violated the sovereignty" of North Korea and "set forth the direction of immediate military action," state-controlled KCNA news agency reported.

On Saturday, North Korea claimed that Seoul had sent unmanned drones with anti-North Korean leaflets to Pyongyang three times in the space of a week.

Authorities in Seoul said they could not confirm whether the North's claims were true, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. The North Korean leader's influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, on Sunday warned of a "horrible disaster" if more drones are detected.

On Tuesday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said Pyongyang had destroyed parts of two roads on the northern side of the demarcation line, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

North Korea had announced plans to cut off all road and rail connections with its southern neighbour last week. State media said the measures were aimed at safeguarding national security and preventing war, although there have been no direct exchanges across the heavily militarized border for several years.

The inter-Korean road connections were once seen as a symbol of cooperation between South and North Korea, Yonhap reported.

Tensions have risen on the Korean Peninsula after Pyongyang significantly expanded its missile tests over the past two years, while sharpening its rhetoric against the United States and South Korea. It has also strengthened its military cooperation with Russia.

At the end of 2023, Kim Jong Un had described inter-Korean relations as such between two warring states at a meeting of the ruling Workers' Party. He had also demanded that South Korea be designated as the main enemy in the country's socialist constitution.