GEIS-新闻详情

North Korea fires unidentified projectile, criticises US ‘hostile’ policy

2021-09-28 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-亚洲原网页

SEOUL (AFP, REUTERS) - Nuclear-armed North Korea fired an "unidentified projectile" into the sea off its east coast, the South's military said on Tuesday (Sept 28).

No further details were immediately available from the South's joint chiefs of staff.

Japan’s Defence Ministry said the launch could have been of a ballistic missile.

The announcement came just before North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations urged the United States to give up its hostile policy towards Pyongyang and said no one could deny his country’s right to self defence and to test weapons.

At the UN General Assembly, North Korea’s UN envoy, Kim Song, said the country was just shoring up its self-defence and if the United States dropped its hostile policy, it would respond “willingly at any time” to offers to talks.

“But it is our judgment that there is no prospect at the present stage for the US to really withdraw its hostile policy,” Kim said.

On Sept 15, North and South Korea both test fired ballistic missiles, the latest volley in a race in which the rivals have been developing increasingly sophisticated weapons.

At the time, Washington condemned the North Korean test - and a separate test days earlier of what experts said could be its first cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead - as a threat to its neighbours.

It did not mention Seoul’s test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).

The latest launch comes just days after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's influential sister Kim Yo Jong, a key adviser to her brother, dangled the prospect of an inter-Korean summit.

But she insisted that "impartiality" and mutual respect would be required, calling for the South to "stop spouting an impudent remark".

She condemned as "double standards" Southern and US criticism of the North's military developments, while the allies build up their own capacities.

The North was also due to open a session of its rubber-stamp Parliament, the Supreme People's Assembly, on Tuesday.

In recent days, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has only months left in office, has reiterated his longstanding calls for a declaration of an official end to the Korean War.

The North invaded the South in 1950 and hostilities ceased three years later with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

Pyongyang is under multiple sets of international sanctions over its banned nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes.