Kim Yo Jong: leafleting in SKorea 'intolerable provocation'

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's powerful sister has described the recent scattering of leaflets by activists in South Korea against North Korea as "an intolerable provocation against it".

Kim Yo Jong, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), issued a statement on Sunday, saying:

"We have already seriously warned the South Korean authorities of consequences their wrong act of giving silent approval to the human wastes' wild moves will bring to the north-south relations."

The statement went on: "However, the south Korean authorities again did not stop the reckless acts of the 'defectors from the north', winking at them. Displeasure cannot be hidden over such sordid acts."

The statement came after a South Korean activist said on Friday that he launched 500,000 propaganda leaflets by balloon into North Korea in defiance of a contentious new law that criminalizes such actions.

The leafleting would be the first known violation of the South Korean law that punishes anti-Pyongyang leafleting with up to three years in prison or a fine of 30 million won (US$27,040).

The law, that took effect last month, has invited criticism that South Korea is sacrificing freedom of expression to improve ties with rival North Korea, which has repeatedly protested the leafleting.

Despite the law, ties between the Koreas remain strained amid a standstill in broader nuclear diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington.