South Korean officials and basketball players left for North Korea by air on Tuesday to participate in friendly matches in Pyongyang, as proposed at a historic inter-Korean summit in April.
The South Korean delegation is led by Unification Minister Cho Myung Gyun and consists of about 100 people, including government officials, and male and female basketball players as well as members of the press.
Speculation abounds within South Korean media that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is known to be an avid basketball fan and who proposed inter-Korean basketball exchanges at the summit, may attend some of the matches.
"The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics became the stepping stone for peace on the Korean Peninsula, and I hope these Pyongyang basketball matches will be an opportunity to strengthen it," Cho told reporters at a military airport near Seoul.
On Wednesday, "peace" and "prosperity" teams comprising a mix of athletes from the two Koreas will play against each other, while on Thursday, the North and South Korean teams will face off. In all, four matches -- two for men and two for women -- will be held over two days.
No national flag or anthem will be used on the occasion, according to the Unification Ministry.
The South Korean delegation is scheduled to return to Seoul on Friday.
At their April 27 summit at the border village of Panmunjeom, Kim and his South Korean counterpart, President Moon Jae In, agreed to encourage the atmosphere of amity and cooperation between the two Koreas by staging various joint events.
On June 18, the two Koreas agreed to hold an inter-Korean basketball match in Pyongyang on the occasion of the July 4 anniversary of a 1972 inter-Korean joint statement. They also agreed to hold another one in the autumn in Seoul.
North Korea sent athletes to the Winter Olympics hosted in Pyeongchang, a South Korean mountain resort, in February, and the two countries formed a unified woman's hockey team then.
The North's participation helped rapprochement between the two Koreas, whose relations had soured over Pyongyang's continued development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
