SEOUL, December 26. /TASS/. The South Korean military failed to track four of the five North Korean drones that intruded into South Korean airspace on Monday, the Yonhap news agency reported.
One of the UAVs reached a northern neighborhood of Seoul and returned back to the DPRK. The other four reportedly made inroads from Ganghwa Island, northwest of Incheon. They stayed in this area for a while before disappearing from radar screens. Their exact flight path could not be tracked.
The South Korean military suspects that the DPRK’s drones may have remained in the country’s airspace for at least 7 hours. "Unidentified objects," presumably drones, were detected in border areas of Gyeonggi-do province at about 10:25 a.m. local time (4:25 a.m. Moscow time). The UAVs crossed the military demarcation line and appeared in Paju, Gimpo, on Ganghwa Island, causing the temporary suspension of 30 civilian flights at Seoul’s airports.
In response, the Republic of Korea scrambled its planes, helicopters and other aircraft. The South Korean military first relayed warning messages and then opened warning fire and eventually started an operation to destroy the drones. A KA-1 was among the planes that South Korea used. Earlier it was reported that the plane crashed at about 11:39 a.m. local time (5:39 a.m. Moscow time). The pilots survived and were not hurt. The last time North Korean drones violated the border was in 2017.