North Korea accused US spy planes of violating its air space and threatened to shoot them down, ramping up tensions just before NATO leaders meet this week in Lithuania for their annual summit.
A spokesman for North Korea’s Defense Ministry said the US was engaging in “the most undisguised nuclear blackmail” by planning to bring a nuclear-armed submarine to the peninsula and conducting “hostile espionage activities” by flying spy planes off its east and west coasts, the Korean Central News Agency reported Monday.
North Korea claimed that drones and spy planes flew for eight straight days along its coasts, with aircraft violating its airspace. “There is no guarantee that such shocking accident as downing of the US Air Force strategic reconnaissance plane will not happen,” it quoted the spokesman as saying.
That appeared to be a reference to North Korea’s 1969 downing of a US Navy reconnaissance plane the Americans said was in international airspace between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, killing all 31 people aboard.
The Defense Ministry spokesman added that Pyongyang will take actions to prevent Washington’s “reckless acts.”
Kim Jong Un’s regime has at times fired off ballistic missiles in a show of anger shortly after making threats. Last month, it launched two short-range nuclear-capable rockets just minutes after KCNA issued a dispatch from a Defense Ministry spokesman denouncing joint US-South Korean military exercises and threatening retaliation.
The latest threats stoke concerns just as South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol attends the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit. Yoon said in an interview with the Associated Press that he will seek help from NATO leaders on how to deter Pyongyang from increasing its atomic ambition.
