Some 9,000 demonstrators, including student activists, rallied and marched in downtown Seoul carrying banners reading "National Unity" with North Korea in the Liberation Day celebrations.

Led by a band playing traditional drums and gongs, some chanted anti-US slogans condemning what they call Washington's hostile policy and attempt to wage war against Pyongyang over the nuclear issue.

Just several blocks away, Christians and war veterans were among the more than 5,000 conservatives holding a separate anti-North Korean rally to condemn Pyongyang's leader Kim Jong-Il and his nuclear program.

Some outraged demonstrators burned large North Korean national flags and effigies of Kim Jong-Il before shattering models of North Korean missiles.

Crowding the City Hall plaza, they expressed strong support for the US campaigns to dismantle the North's nuclear programs and denounced what they called the pro-North elements in South Korea.

The police deployed hundreds of buses as well as thousands of troops in downtown Seoul to prevent possible violence during the simultaneous rallies by the ideologically-opposed groups.

South Koreans have in the past organized massive anti-Japan rallies to celebrate Liberation Day, marking the end of the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule of the Korean peninsula.

A few hundred anti-Japanese activists met at a downtown Seoul park Friday to protest what they consider to be Tokyo's revived imperialism.

In Pyongyang, Premier Hong Song-Nam was among top officials attending Liberation Day events, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

Hong used the ceremony to highlight the need for Korean unity to frustrate war efforts by "outsiders and the anti-reunification forces."

"It is an important task of the organizations of the reunification movement in the North and the South and abroad at present to conduct a vigorous movement for peace against war," Hong was quoted as saying by KCNA.

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