Pyongyang blames Seoul for island attack
Seoul (AsiaNews) – North Korea today defended its deadly attack last month on a South Korean border island. In a reference to joint US-South Korean military exercises, it said the South's "puppet warmongers" provoked the incident to try to spark a wider conflict.
On 23 November, North Korean artillery shelled Yeonpyeong Island, which is within South Korea’s internationally recognised maritime borders, killing two civilians and two marines. South Korea responded by firing some 80 shells against North Korean military posts.
According to a report by KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, South Korea is lying about the maritime border dividing the two countries. Issued by the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the report purportedly tells the world the truth about the shelling incident in the Western Sea of Korea.
For the new agency, the report shows who provoked the action and is responsible for the incident. It claims that South Korea fired “as many as thousands of shells into the territorial waters of the DPRK [North] side”. It goes on to say that “This reckless act was obviously a deliberate provocation to prompt the DPRK to take a military counter-action.”
In an evident attempt to boost its propaganda value for the North, the report said that the incident “goes to clearly prove that the US was the arch criminal who orchestrated and wire-pulled the incident behind the scene.
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