SEOUL - A GROUP of North Korean defectors said on Saturday that they had flown a fresh batch of anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets over the border, a move considered highly provocative by the communist state.

Mr Lee Min Bok, who leads a group of North Korean Christians, said they sent 1.5 million leaflets into the North Friday from Baekryeong island near the inter-Korean border in the Yellow Sea.

'We sent a total of 1.5 million leaflets carried by 26 helium balloons into the North on Friday,' Mr Lee of the North Korea Christian Association told journalists.

Plastic bags, which contained daily necessities such as socks, stockings, toothpaste, toothbrushes, aspirin, ball-point pens and cigarette lighters, were also floated on sea currents flowing north, he said.

'We had favourable weather conditions this month,' Mr Lee said, adding the group had scattered millions of such leaflets in December by taking advantage of winds blowing north.

'We're sending these leaflets for the purpose of evangelising North Koreans and rescuing them,' he said.

Activists, mostly North Korean defectors, have been sending leaflets across the border for years without creating much of a stir.

But the fliers became a major cause of tension against the backdrop of worsening inter-Korean ties, especially after they touched on the reported health problems of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il.

North Korea's Committee for Peaceful Unification of Fatherland (CPUF) on Friday issued a fresh warning against what it said was the South's policy of confrontation.

'We'll never tolerate the anti-Republic (North Korea) moves by the current South Korean regime and we will certainly settle the score with them,' a spokesman for the CPUF was quoted as saying by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.

Inter-Korean ties have been deteriorating towards those seen during the Cold War since the inauguration of the conservative government of South Korean President Lee Myung Bak in February.

Mr Lee rolled back his liberal predecessor's policy of engagement by linking economic aid to the North with progress in denuclearisation, openness and reform, terms highly unlikely to be accepted by the hardline communist state.

This month, the North expelled hundreds of South Korean workers from the Kaesong joint industrial estate and imposed strict border controls, in protest at what it called the South's policy of confrontation.

On Friday, it said it had arrested a man who tried to conduct a 'terrorist mission' against Mr Kim under orders from a South Korean intelligence agency - an allegation denied by the South's spy agency, the National Intelligence Service. -- AFP