South Koreans vacate resort in North after shooting

Hundreds of South Korean tourists vacated a mountain resort in the North on Saturday, a day after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a 53-year-old woman vacationer who wandered into a military zone in the area.

The incident comes as ties between the states, technically still at war, chilled in recent months and South Korea's new president, who has advocated taking a tough line with Pyongyang, repeated calls for dialogue.

After the shooting on Friday, South Korea suspended tourism to the Mount Kumgang resort, located a few kilometres north of the heavily fortified border on the east coast.

The South Korean affiliate of the Hyundai Group that runs the resort has been shuttling tourists back to the South since Friday.

"There were 1,362 tourists in Mount Kumkang and we expect 1,012 of them to return to the South today," said an official with resort operator Hyundai Asan.

Medical authorities said the victim, Park Wang-ja, was shot once in the chest and once in her buttocks.

Park, the wife of a retired policeman, had left her hotel to watch the sunrise over the sea, fellow travellers told local media.

She had apparently strayed past fenced-off resort grounds and was shot by a North Korean sentry in the pre-dawn hours of Friday when she entered the military zone, South Korean government officials said.

South Korea is conducting an investigation and looking into North Korean claims that a sentry shouted at Park to halt, and fired a warning shot before shooting the housewife.

A South Korean Unification Ministry official said North Korea has shown little interest in cooperating in the investigation.

GENTLE AND KIND

"Park was very gentle and kind," Chae Young-soon, a neighbour told local reporters.

The North Korean resort, opened in 1998, has been visited by almost two million South Koreans. Park is the first South Korean tourist killed by a North Korean, a government official said.

The resort has hotels, stores, a golf course and a spa staffed by North Koreans. There is also a heavy North Korean military presence in the area, which has been a key naval zone for the reclusive state.

The resort has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to impoverished North Korea with tourists paying a fee to enter the country and the communist state taking a cut on food, lodging and recreation expenses paid by tourists.

Before the incident was made public on Friday, President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February, repeated a call to the North to return to inter-Korean discussions.

Pyongyang has called Lee "a traitor to the nation" for cutting off what had been a free flow of aid and seeking to tie Seoul's largesse to progress the North makes in disarmament.

In April, North Korea said it was cutting off dialogue with its wealthy neighbour, despite Lee's calls to tone down heated rhetoric and get back to serious talks.