Two Koreas Trade Warnings Over Ship's Sinking

SEOUL, South Korea, May 20, 2010 — -- Tensions are mounting on the Korean peninsula as the two Koreas exchanged warnings over a South Korean navy ship that sank last March, killing 46 sailors near the disputed western sea border.

A multinational team of experts in Seoul concluded Wednesday that it was a North Korean torpedo that split the vessel in half after an explosion.

In a two-hour live nationally televised press conference, the civilian-military investigative team offered computer simulations, providing what it said was scientific proof of the origins of the attack. The report said a North Korean submarine had fired a torpedo, causing a massive underwater blast.

The smoking gun, according to the investigators, was a propeller that powered the torpedo, which a pair of South Korean fishing boats uncovered at the bottom of the ocean. Its form and size "perfectly matched" the blueprint of torpedoes that Pyongyang, the seat of the North Korean government, had used in its catalogs when trying to sell the weapons abroad, said the chief investigator Yoon Duk-yong.

Also on a fragment of the propeller was a serial number, handwritten as "number 1" in Korean.

The investigative team showed a picture of a stray North Korean torpedo that South Korea had obtained seven years ago, which also had a handwritten "number 4" on it. "There is no other plausible explanation," said the chief investigator. "The evidence overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that it was a torpedo fired by North Korea."

When asked if the team was confident that the recovered fragments of the torpedo were from the same torpedo that had damaged the sunken ship, the investigators explained that the chemical analysis showed traces of explosives that were identical to the ones collected from the vessel.