North Korea on Monday sought to explain its interception of an American spyplane by four fighter jets in international airspace as a defensive act.
”We can not stand by and watch the aggressive attempts by the US army,” said a commentary in the government mouthpiece Rodong Sinmun newspaper, China’s Xinhua news agency reported from the North Korean capital Pyongyang.
”If the US aggressors had not reinforced the military build-up against us and committed such aggressive acts as that of the reconnaissance aircraft, the interception would not have happened.”
Pyongyang’s defence of its actions came on the day it raised the stakes in the nuclear standoff with the United States still further by lobbing an anti-ship missile into the Sea of Japan, according to Japan’s Defence Agency.
The firing followed the testing of a similar anti-ship missile on February 24, as the hermit state presses for direct dialogue with Washington to resolve the five-month-old stalemate, ignoring calls for restraint by Beijing.
The Rodong Sinmun charged that the US was paying lip service to negotiations and diplomacy on the one hand while ”strengthening the aggressive forces around the Korean peninsula and staging military exercises against the DPRK (North Korea),” Xinhua reported.
Over the weekend, almost 5 000 US and South Korean troops conducted two-day joint maneuvers near the demilitarised zone that has divided the Korean peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War.
Top US officials said on Sunday that Washington would eventually talk to North Korea but only as part of a ”broader dialogue” involving other nations in the region.
In the meantime it is sending 24 long range bombers to the western Pacific as a deterrent.
It has also indicated it will probably deploy an Aegis cruiser, which is equipped with powerful air defence radars, to protect US surveillance flights in the area against a repeat of the March 2 incident.
The North Korean jets had flown within 15 metres of the unarmed US RC-135s reconnaissance aircraft off the North Korean coast over the Sea of Japan, chasing
it for 22 minutes. It was the first time a US surveillance flight had been intercepted by North Korean fighters since 1969, when North Korean warplanes shot down a US surveillance plane, killing all 31 people on board.
On Saturday, the New York Times claimed that the North was trying to force the aircraft to land in North Korea and seize its crew. ”Clearly, it appears their intention was to divert the aircraft to North Korea, and take (its crew) hostage,” a senior defence official told the daily.
The American crew members ignored gestured commands to follow the North Korean planes, aborted the surveillance mission and returned safely to their home base at Kadena Air Base in Japan, the paper said.
US intelligence anticipates escalating challenges in the air, along maritime boundaries and in the demilitarized zone as Pyongyang maneuvers to revive its nuclear weapons programme, officials have said. – Sapa-AFP