North Korea claims US targeted it with anthrax

North Korea has accused the United States of targeting it with anthrax and asked the United Nations Security Council to investigate Washington’s “biological warfare schemes” after a live anthrax sample was sent to a U.S. base in South Korea.

Live anthrax samples, which can be used as a biological weapon, were inadvertently sent to Australia, Canada, Britain, South Korea and laboratories in 19 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., the Pentagon said recently.

“The United States not only possesses deadly weapons of mass destruction … but also is attempting to use them in actual warfare against [North Korea],” Pyongyang’s U.N. Ambassador Ja Song Nam wrote in a letter to the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which was made public Friday.

U.S. investigators are trying to ascertain whether the shipments of live anthrax stemmed from quality control problems at the U.S. military base in Utah which sent them, Pentagon officials have said.

North Korea “strongly requests the Security Council take up the issue of the shipment of anthrax germs in order to thoroughly investigate the biological warfare schemes of the United States,” Ja wrote in his letter, dated June 4.

He attached a statement from North Korea’s National Defence Commission, which urged the world to consider the anthrax shipment “the gravest challenge to peace and a hideous crime aimed at genocide.”

[Reuters]

This entry was posted in DPRK Government by Grant Montgomery.