World

N. KOREA THREATENS TO HOLD MISSILE TESTS, SLAMS US

SEOUL, Thursday (Reuters) North Korea threatened to resume long-range missile testing and demanded the United States apologise for calling the country "an outpost of tyranny", official media reported late.

The Korean-language version of a Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report quoted a Foreign Ministry statement as saying Pyongyang threatened to test-fire a long-range missile.

The statement said North Korea did not feel bound by a 1999 moratorium on missile testing, reached when Pyongyang was in non-proliferation talks with the administration of then U.S. president Bill Clinton.

"There is now no binding force for us on the moratorium on missile testing," the Korean-language report said. "We are not legally bound by an international treaty, or anything else on the missile issue."

The North said its dialogue with the United States ended with the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and that meant it now had the right to resume missile testing.

Pyongyang slammed the Bush administration for first branding North Korea part of an "axis of evil" and more recently describing it as an an outpost of tyranny.

It called on Washington to apologise."How can we sit at the negotiating table with the U.S. given that the U.S. has rejected the government of the DPRK (North Korea)," KCNA reported.

On Feb. 10., North Korea officially announced for the first time that it had nuclear weapons and said it was pulling out of six-party talks aimed at curbing its nuclear ambitions.

It cited Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's designation of North Korea as one of the "outposts of tyranny" during her Senate confirmation in January.

The North said that statement was evidence that Washington had not abandoned its "hostile" policy toward North Korea, first made manifest when President George W. Bush famously grouped North Korea, Iran and prewar Iraq in an "axis of evil".

The English-language version of the KCNA report, however, did not contain the missile-testing threat and held out the possibility of a return to six-party disarmament talks "if the U.S. takes a trustworthy and sincere attitude".