South Korea said on Sunday it was "unimaginable" for a North Korean soldier to shoot dead a unarmed housewife vacationing at a resort in the North, calling on it to come clean over the incident damaging already strained ties.

The woman, 53, was gunned down in the predawn hours of Friday when she apparently wandered into a North Korean military area near the Mount Kumgang resort, located on the east coast and just a few kilometres north of the heavily fortified border.

"If a strict investigation is not conducted over this tragic incident, that would be like throwing cold water on expectations for developments in inter-Korean relations through South-North talks," the Unification Ministry said in a statement.

"The act was wrong by any measure, unimaginable and should not have taken place at all."

South Korea suspended tourism after the shooting and officials said that all of the about 1,300 tourists at the resort at the time of the incident would have left by Sunday.

A North Korean spokesman put the blame on the South and demanded an apology.

"The South side should be held responsible for the incident," the North's official KCNA news agency on Saturday quoted the spokesman as saying.

"The South Korean tourist intruded deep into the area under the military control of the North side all alone at dawn, going beyond the clearly marked boundary fence, even (her) shoes got wet," the spokesman said.

Park, the wife of a retired policeman, had left her hotel to watch the sunrise over the sea at the beach, fellow travellers told local media. A funeral was planned for Sunday.

A South Korean tourist also at the beach at the time of the shooting told local media Park passed by him and after awhile he heard two gun shots within a 10-second interval.

"I heard a scream, which made me turn left, and I saw a person collapse while three (North Korean) soldiers ran out from the mountain," Lee In-bok, told South Korean TV network

YTN.

"Soldiers nudged the fallen person by their feet but I never thought (that person) was a tourist," Lee added.

Park had been shot in the chest and rear.

The North Korean resort, opened in 1998, has been visited by almost 2 million South Koreans. Park is the first South Korean tourist killed by a North Korean, a government official said. It was hailed as a milestone in reconciliation between the two states still technically at war.

The resort has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to impoverished North Korea with tourists paying a fee to enter the country and the communist state taking a cut on food, lodging and recreation expenses paid by tourists.

Before the incident was made public on Friday, President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February, extended an olive branch to his prickly neighbour and repeated a call to the North to return to inter-Korean discussions.

Pyongyang has called Lee "a traitor to the nation" for cutting off what had been a free flow of aid and seeking to tie Seoul's largesse to progress the North makes in disarmament.

In April, North Korea said it was stopping dialogue with its wealthy neighbour, despite Lee's calls to tone down heated rhetoric and get back to serious talks.