The possibility of talks between nuclear-armed North Korea and Washington is “narrowing,” Pyongyang said on Tuesday after the US State Department reaffirmed its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Last month North Korea walked away from working-level nuclear talks with the US in Sweden, saying it was disappointed at the lack of “new and creative” solutions offered by Washington.
The process has been deadlocked since the Hanoi summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump broke up in February. Pyongyang has since demanded Washington come forward with a new approach by the end of this year.
On Friday the US State Department in an annual report reaffirmed the North’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, reiterating that it was “implicated in assassinations on foreign soil.”
Kim’s older half brother Kim Jong-nam was killed at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport in 2017. Authorities implicated Pyongyang but in April Malaysian prosecutors dropped murder charges against a Vietnamese woman who was the only remaining suspect.
North Korea’s foreign ministry condemned the document as “a grave politically motivated provocation,” the official KCNA news agency reported on Tuesday, a spokesperson calling the US a “hotbed and ringleader of terrorism” itself.
“The channel of the dialogue between the DPRK and the US is more and more narrowing due to such attitude and stand of the US,” he added using the initials for the North’s official name.
This picture released on Sunday by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (center) celebrating the test-firing of a newly developed multiple rocket launcher at an undisclosed location. [cover Image: AFP]
