SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea criticized the United States’ top envoy to Seoul for making provocative remarks about the communist country, calling the ambassador a “tyrant,” a news report said Sunday.
U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow labeled the North a “criminal regime” this month, citing Pyongyang’s alleged arms dealing, money laundering and counterfeiting.
Since then, North Korea has repeatedly called on the South to expel Vershbow for slandering the North.
“It is clear (Vershbow) is a tyrant wearing the mask of a diplomat,” the North’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary Sunday, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
In Beijing, meanwhile, a Japanese envoy said Japan and North Korea have agreed to set up three working groups to resolve sticking points preventing the two countries from establishing diplomatic ties.
Talks will focus on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and on Japanese abducted and taken to North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, said Akitaka Saiki, Japan’s chief negotiator at talks in Beijing.
He said the next round of negotiations would take place in late January.
U.S. allegations of the North’s counterfeiting have been a major obstacle to the resumption of six-way talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear arms program. North Korea has dismissed the allegations as lies and threatened to boycott the talks with the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia unless Washington lifts financial sanctions.
Vershbow’s comments also have drawn rebukes from South Korean officials. Kim Won-wung, a lawmaker of the ruling Uri Party, recently warned he would campaign for Vershbow’s expulsion unless the ambassador moderates his criticism of the North.
In a separate report Sunday by the North’s Korean Central News Agency, a spokesman for the Committee for the North’s Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland described the Korean Peninsula as a touch-and-go situation in which a war may break out any moment due to “war moves” by the U.S. and South Korea.
About 32,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.
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