The Cabinet approved a revised bill Tuesday to extend missions for some of its troops protecting aid workers in Afghanistan by one year, to the end of 2013.
Some 150 Korean aid workers and police officers have been involved in a reconstruction mission in the northern Afghan city of Charikar since mid-2010, protected by some 350 troops of the Ashena unit stationed there.
Under the revised bill, up to 70 combat troops will remain in the war-ravaged country to protect aid workers, collectively called the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), for another one-year term to the end of next year, while 289 members of the unit will be pulled out by the end of this year as scheduled.
The move came after the Seoul government agreed to extend the PRT mission by one year to the end of next year.
The remaining troops will operate in the northern Afghan province of Parwan and around the Korean Embassy in Kabul, according to the defense ministry.
The Korean PRT base in Charikar came under a series of rocket attacks last year, but no injuries were reported. No such attacks have taken place thus far this year, foreign ministry officials said.
The Cabinet also endorsed a bill to extend the deployment of Korean troops off Somalia and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for one more year to the end of 2013.
The 310-member Cheonghae Unit has been deployed in the Gulf of Aden since early 2009 as part of a global effort to tackle piracy in the region, and the Akh unit, with 150 soldiers, has been in based in the eastern region of Al Ain in the UAE since 2011 tasked with training the Middle East nation's special operations forces.
"The revision will be presented to the National Assembly soon for approval," a defense ministry official said.
The Cabinet also approved a bill to purchase a plot of land in Naegok-dong on the southern edge of Seoul, which had been reserved for President Lee Myung-bak's retirement home and auxiliary facilities for security personnel there.
The land is at the center of controversy, with an independent investigation set to be launched into the case, as the cost was not shared evenly for the plot jointly bought by Lee's 34-year-old son, Si-hyung, and the presidential security service.
Some raise suspicions that the security service paid too high a price for the site in a scheme to allow the son to profit from buying the land at a below-market price, which the presidential office has flatly denied.
Lee later scrapped the project and decided to move into his existing private house in Nonhyun-dong in southern Seoul after leaving office. His term will end next February.
"The Cabinet decided to set aside 1.12 billion won to purchase the land from Lee's son, which is the same amount he originally paid for the property," a finance ministry official said. "We will find diverse ways to use the whole plot as a state-owned land." (Yonhap)