South Korea will send an advance team to North Korea this week to inspect preparations for an upcoming reunion event for families separated by the Korea War, a unification ministry official said Tuesday.
The team comprised of government officials and civilians, including those from Hyundai Asan, which is involved in inter-Korean business, will leave for Mount Kumgang on the North's east coast on Wednesday and stay there until later this month to examine ongoing preparations for the reunion event.
(Yonhap)
In June, the two Koreas had Red Cross talks and agreed to hold the family reunions from Aug. 20-26 involving 100 people from each side. Earlier, they exchanged the final lists of their people who will take part in the event.
Ninety-three South Korean participants will be reunited with their long-lost families from Aug. 20-22, which will be followed by a reunion of 88 North Koreans with their South Korean families from Aug. 24-26.
The reunion event will be the first of its kind since October 2015. The two Koreas have held 20 rounds of face-to-face family reunions since the first-ever inter-Korean summit in 2000.
Government figures show that the number of South Koreans who have applied to meet their families or relatives in the North stood at 132,124 as of the end of May, of which about 57,000 remain alive.
The two Koreas technically remain at war as the Korean War ended only with an armistice, not a peace treaty. (Yonhap)
