PARIS: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has invited the South’s President Moon Jae-in for a summit in Pyongyang, stirring hopes of a tentative rapprochement between the bitterly divided neighbours, reports AFP. Tensions soared last year as the North made rapid progress on its banned nuclear weapons programmes, while US President Donald Trump engaged in an increasingly bellicose verbal scrap with Pyongyang’s leader.

Here are some key moments in the decades-long standoff between the two Koreas: War but no peace -In June 1950 fighting broke out between the communist North and capitalist South, sparking a brutal war that killed between two and four million people. Beijing backed Pyongyang in the three-year conflict, while Washington threw its support behind the South—alliances that have largely endured.

The Koreas have been locked in a dangerous dance ever since that conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty, leaving them technically at war.

Pyongyang has tested the fragile ceasefire with numerous attacks.

The secretive nation sent a team of 31 commandos to Seoul in a botched attempt to assassinate then-President Park Chung-Hee in 1968. All but two were killed.

In the “axe murder incident” of 1976, North Korean soldiers attacked a work party trying to chop down a tree inside the Demilitarized Zone, leaving two US army officers dead.

Pyongyang launched perhaps its most audacious assassination attempt in Myanmar in 1983, when a bomb exploded in a Yangon mausoleum during a visit by South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan. He survived but 21 people, including some government ministers, were killed.

In 1987 a bomb on a Korean Air flight exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 people on board. Seoul accused Pyongyang, which denied involvement.