The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Friday accused South Korean authorities of smearing it in connection with a recent shelling case near Yonphyong Island, the official news agency KCNA reported.
According to the KCNA, the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea issued bulletin No. 978 on Friday to denounce South Korean authorities for accusing the DPRK of firing shells into the waters near Yonphyong Island, saying the "conspiratorial moves" proved they "engrossed in escalating confrontation and breeding plots."
The bulletin said the south once described blasting for the construction of a power station in Ryanggang Province of the DPRK as a "mushroom cloud" and "nuclear test," called a timber floating in the East Sea of Korea a submarine of the north, announced that it detected a submarine of the north by radar after it was proven to be a flock of birds and misjudged its passenger airline as an "enemy plane" and fired at it.
Thus, "the current shelling case is nothing but an extension of such burlesque," clearly proved that all the "cases" for which the south blamed the DPRK in the past were fabricated in such a manner, the bulletin said.
The provocative conspiratorial moves of the south are aimed at faking another shocking case in the wake of that of last year to chill the atmosphere for improvement of inter-Korean relations, maintain the confrontation policy, divert elsewhere the public attention from the internal crisis and stymie the efforts to defuse the tension on the Korean Peninsula, said the bulletin.
The bulletin urged South Korean authorities to "cool its head, overheated with confrontational ambition, act with discretion and give up the foolish anti-DPRK conspiratorial and reckless moves for a war against the DPRK if it does not want self-destruction."
On Wednesday, South Korea fired shots in response to what it said was a sound of artillery shells presumably fired by the DPRK, one of which fell near the disputed maritime border Pyongyang refuses to acknowledge.
The head of the north side to the north-south military working-level talks said on Aug. 10 that it hadn't fired shots to the disputed western sea border and sound of "shelling" was actually blasting for construction work.