North Korea on Sunday described February break-in on its embassy in Madrid by a dissident group as a "grave terrorist attack" and demanded a probe into the perpetrators behind the incident.
On February 22, an anti-North-Korean group that calls for the overthrowing of the Kim Jong-un regime broke into the North Korean Embassy in Madrid, where they heckled with the employees before dashing off with computers and documents, Yonhap News Agency reported.
The development comes five days ahead of the second US-North Korea summit in Hanoi, which ultimately ended without any agreement reached.
"A grave terrorist attack occurred on February 22, where an armed group attacked the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) Embassy in Spain. An illegal intrusion into an occupation of a diplomatic mission and act of extortion is a grave breach of state sovereignty and a flagrant violation of international law, and this kind of act should never be tolerated," a spokesperson of North Korea's foreign ministry told state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Free Joseon, a mysterious anti-North Korea group, later claimed responsibility for the raid and said that it shared some information obtained from North Korean embassy with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on "their request."
North Korea is "following the rumours that FBI of the United States and the small fry of anti-DPRK 'body' were involved in the terror attack," the KCNA said.
More From This Section
It added that North Korea expected the Spanish authorities to "carry out an investigation into the incident to the last in a responsible manner in order to bring the terrorists and their wire-pullers to justice in conformity with the relevant international law," Yonhap News Agency reported.
On Wednesday, a Spanish court had named Mexican national Adrian Hong Chang as leader of the dissident group who contacted "the FBI in New York five days after the assault" with details related to the incident in the North Korean embassy.
The court said that two of the miscreants reportedly took the embassy's commercial attache to an underground room and urged him to defect, but refused to do so.
Meanwhile, the FBI is yet to confirm or deny the existence of its inquiry. US State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino had previously denied the government's involvement in the incident.