Korea officers in shoving match over fishing grounds

SEOUL (Reuters) - North and South Korean military officers briefly got into a shoving match on Thursday at talks on forming a joint fishing area in disputed waters, after the North tried to put on a slide show on where it should go.

Disagreement on the fishing zone in the Yellow Sea centers on where and how big it should be. The talks are part of efforts to reduce tensions along the two Koreas' contentious maritime border.

North Korea has insisted on extending the area deeper into waters claimed by the South, while the South wants it to straddle a sea border called the Northern Limit Line (NLL), which Pyongyang does not recognize.

"You should not do this," a South Korean officer said, as he jumped to stop North Korean staffers who were preparing to set up a slide of a map at talks in the joint truce village on the Demilitarised Zone border.

"Under an earlier agreement, this is not supposed to be shown in public," the South Korean officer said in the presence of reporters.

When, a moment later, a North Korean officer tried to display the map again, showing Pyongyang's proposal for a joint fishing area south of the NLL, a shoving match ensued, with neither man willing to yield an inch.

North Korean Major General Kim Yong-chol looked on with his eyebrows raised.

When the meeting restarted later, the chief delegates from the two sides both demanded the other apologize for being inflexible.

The two Koreas remain technically at war under a truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War. No peace treaty has been signed.