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‘FALSE ALARM’

Seoul’s ‘Wartime Alert’ Dropped After Cause of Panic Revealed

Residents were ordered to evacuate the South Korean capital.

A woman looks at her cellphone with an emergency evacuation message while watching a TV broadcasting a news report on North Korea firing what it called a space satellite toward the south, in Seoul, South Korea, May 31, 2023.

Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

By Dan Ladden-Hall

A petrifying “wartime alert” sent to Seoul residents’ phones on Wednesday morning turned out to have been a “false alarm,” South Korean authorities said. Air raid sirens sounded throughout the capital as locals were sent an official message telling them to be “prepared to evacuate and allow children and the elderly to evacuate first.” A formal evacuation order was issued soon after, only for the order to be scrapped around 10 minutes later. It turned out that the panic had been sparked by the failed rocket launch of North Korea’s first spy satellite, which South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said crashed in the Yellow Sea.

Read it at Financial Times

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