North Korea accuses US of pushing region into security crisis

ANKARA

North Korea accused the US of pushing the region into a security crisis and said all efforts of Washington to disarm Pyongyang would fail.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, slammed the US for calling on the UN Security Council to limit North Korea's "unlawful weapons."

“The UNSC has turned blind eyes to the very dangerous military drills of the US and South Korea and their greedy arms buildup aiming at the DPRK and taken issue with the DPRK's exercise of its inviolable right to self-defense corresponding to them. This is evidently the application of double standards,” Kim said in the statement, published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

“Great irony is that as soon as the UNSC opening meeting was over, the US vented its anger on failure in realizing its sinister intention while making public a disgusting ‘joint statement’ together with such rabbles as Britain, France, Australia, Japan and South Korea, not concealing its bad mood,” Kim added.

On Monday, the US called on the UN Security Council to take "strong action" on North Korea in response to Pyongyang's latest intercontinental ballistic missile launch, in violation of UN resolutions.

Kim rejected the US and its allies' reactions over Pyongyang's latest missiles test and said Washington is driving the situation of the Korean peninsula to a new phase of the crisis.

“The US should be mindful that no matter how desperately it may seek to disarm the DPRK, it can never deprive the DPRK of its right to self-defense and that the more hell-bent it gets on the anti-DPRK acts, it will face a more fatal security crisis," Kim concluded.

*Writing by Islamuddin Sajid