North Korea on Thursday described its firing of rocket artillery and an apparent short-range ballistic missile over the weekend as a regular and defensive military exercise and ridiculed South Korea for criticizing the launches.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency published a statement by an unnamed military spokesman who called South Korea's criticism a "cock-and-bull story," hours before senior defense officials from South Korea, United States and Japan met in Seoul to discuss the North Korean launches and other security issues.
Details from the meeting weren't immediately announced.
A separate statement by a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman, also unnamed, described the launches as a "routine and self-defensive military drill."
It said Pyongyang has been demonstrating "maximum patience" over the impasse in nuclear talks with Washington and that "baseless allegations" against the North's legitimate exercise of sovereignty and self-defense rights would threaten to push things toward a direction "neither we nor they want to see at all."
Otherwise, they will be subject to a pelting rain of kicks and blows." The statement by the North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said the labeling of the North Korean military drill as provocative is an "undisguised manifestation of the attempt to press the gradual disarmament of our state and finally invade us."
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