Defectors send anti-Kim leaflets to north Korea

Defectors from North Korea launched leaflets calling for an uprising in the communist state across the tense border from the South on Wednesday following the death of leader Kim Jong-Il.

The 200,000 leaflets, carried by gas-filled balloons with timing devices to scatter them, contained news of the Arab Spring popular revolts and lambasted the North's dynastic transition to Kim's youngest son, Jong-Un.

"Rise up people. Fight bravely like the Africans to end the third-generation succession," the leaflets read.

The launches came two days after the North announced that its leader had died on Saturday of a heart attack aged 69.

"We welcome the miserable death of Kim Jong-Il," the defectors and activists shouted, who also handed out a statement attacking the late leader's youngest son for inheriting the dictatorship from his "butcher" father.

North Korean state media reported Wednesday that millions of grief-stricken people had turned out to mourn Kim, with television showing mourners weeping before his portrait.

South Korean activists have regularly sent leaflets over the border lambasting the ruling Kim dynasty or carrying news of the popular uprisings seen in the Middle East and North Africa in the past year.

The communist North, which tightly controls news from outside, has threatened to fire across the heavily fortified border to stop the launches.

South Korea's government has made conciliatory gestures to its neighbour following Kim's death, scrapping a plan to display Christmas lights near their shared border.

Seoul resumed the display last December, ending a suspension of several years, after a shelling attack by the North on a border island killed four South Koreans the previous month.

South Korea also accuses its neighbour of torpedoing a warship in March 2010 with the loss of 46 lives.

The South sent its sympathies Tuesday to the North Korean people but said that it would not send an official mourning delegation to Pyongyang.