[Yonhap News Photo ]
South Korea's biggest coastguard patrol ship was brought into service Thursday on its first operational mission to stop illegal fishing by Chinese vessels and guard a disputed island in the Yellow Sea.
The 5,000-ton ship was named after Lee Cheong-ho, a coastguard officer who was killed on duty in 2011 while dealing with illegal Chinese fishing boats.
The 150.5-meter-long vessel can sail at a top speed of 26 knots, featuring a 76 mm main gun as well as 40mm and 20mm secondary guns. It has hangar facilities for a helicopter and can deploy four small high-speed boats.
The ship was commissioned in a ceremony at a new naval base in Sogwipo on the southern resort island of Jeju. The base has been built to defend South Korea's marine sovereignty and gateway to the Pacific Ocean.
Within four hours from the base, South Korea can send a warship to a disputed area over a submerged rock which has been the subject of a territorial row between Beijing and Seoul. The rock known as Ieodo in South Korea and Suyan Rock in China lies within the overlapping exclusive economic zones of the two countries.
Although the international maritime law stipulates that a submerged rock cannot be claimed as territory by any country, South Korea effectively controls the rock by building a research station and a helipad in 2003.
"With the Lee Cheong-ho ship in commission, we are able to guard our sovereignty around Ieodo and implement our duty more faithfully in southernmost territorial waters," Lee Myong-jun, the region's coastguard chief, said at the ceremony.
The ceremony coincided with a five-day port call by a squadron of three Chinese warships to South Korea's southern port of Busan. The Chinese vessels left Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong Province in December 2015 for their mission off Somalia.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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