Korean Embassy in Beijing fired at amid diplomatic row

The Korean Embassy in Beijing was hit by a small metal ball Tuesday amid growing tension between Korea and China.

Koreans have grown hostile toward China in the wake of the killing of a Korean Coast Guard officer by a Chinese fisherman, while certain Chinese might have considered Korea`s response excessive.

The key to the incident is who initiated the attack and why. The attack is known to have occurred between 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., when more than 300 Koreans from a conservative civic group protested the killing in front of the Chinese Embassy in Seoul. News of the protest was delivered to China in real time, possibly prompting an angry response that led to the attack on the Korean Embassy in Beijing.

When a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu in Chinese, in the East China Sea erupted between China and Japan in September last year, a Japanese school in the Chinese city of Tianjin was hit by three small projectiles.

In Beijing, the perpetrator apparently fired the metal projectile from a high-rise building in front of the Korean Embassy. The projectile hit a staff lounge on the first floor of a building to the right of the embassy`s main building.

Outside of the lounge is a two-story accessory building across a road and a flower bed five to six meters wide. Judging from the angle of the shot, the metal ball might be shot from one of the embassy buildings, a five-story building across the street in front of the embassy or the Hilton Hotel located about 200 meters away from the embassy.

The type of weapon used to fire the fingernail-size projectile holds the key to the case as well. The Chinese government assumed the projectile was shot with a slingshot considering that no gunshot was heard, the projectile failed to penetrate a window, and unlike projectiles used for air rifles, the projectile was a ball.

The projectile was strong enough to make a hole in thick tempered glass, however. Given this, a hunting air gun, whose gunshot is not loud, might have been used.

mungchii@donga.com koh@donga.com