North Korean trash balloon drops leaflets calling South Korean president and his wife mentally unstable

A trash-filled balloon sent by North Korea fell on the presidential compound in Seoul and scattered leaflets deriding president Yoon Suk Yeol and first lady Kim Keon Hee, South Korean authorities said on Thursday.

South Korea ‘s presidential security service said one of the balloons floated by North Korea burst over the presidential compound on Thursday morning, dropping rubbish. There were no dangerous items in it, but there were leaflets with graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of leaving South Koreans living in despair and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable.

This came just days after Pyongyang declared the rival neighbour a "hostile state" amid rising tensions in East Asia . North Korean propaganda leaflets carried by the balloons were also found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital.

The rival Koreas have ramped up the rhetoric against each other over North Korea’s claims that South Korea flew drones over its capital to scatter propaganda leaflets earlier this month.

Seoul this week also demanded that North Korea withdraw troops it allegedly sent to Russia to help Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine, amid fears that Moscow would arm Pyongyang with nuclear weapons as a reward.

The leaflets were scattered in Seoul’s Yongsan district, where the presidential office is located, the security service said, adding the North had begun using GPS technology to drop balloons more accurately.

North Korea has been floating balloons carrying leaflets and trash into South Korea since May, in retaliation for the South sending propaganda leaflets the other way.

The North also destroyed its side of the inter-Korea road earlier this month after vowing to cut off road and railway links that once symbolised cooperation and eventual peace between the two countries, prompting the South to fire warning shots.

In spite of the North routinely sending balloons their way, South Korean experts claimed Pyongyang lacked the technology to drop them on specific targets.

“Whether the balloons have GPS or not, it’s all about launching them in large numbers and hitting the right altitude based on wind direction and speed, so they can ride those winds to travel,” Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute, told the Associated Press.

The two Koreas are still technically at war, as the Korean War was ended in the 1953 by an armistice not a peace treaty.