North Korea says it has completed an analysis of a drone that went down near Pyongyang earlier this month after allegedly dropping propaganda critical of the Kim Jong Un regime.
The North Korean defense ministry on Sunday released the final results of its investigation into the alleged violation of the country’s sovereignty by a drone launched from the South, according to an English-language statement released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The defense ministry said the investigation, which also involved the country’s secret police agency and other government bodies, conducted a “comprehensive” study into the flight control module from the “enemy drone,” gathering a total of 238 flight plans and logs.
Newsweek has reached out to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, China, and the South Korean embassy in Washington, D.C., with emailed requests for comment.
This image released by North Korea on October 19 shows a downed drone it said was dispatched by South Korean defense forces. North Korea’s defense ministry says it scattered “political motivational rubbish”.
Korean Central News Agency
South Korea’s military had previously refused to comment on the veracity of the North’s claims. At a press conference on Monday, South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Lee Sung-joon told local media that these claims were “not worth responding to.”
According to the statement, analysis showed the drone took off on October 8 at 11:25 p.m. from Paekryong Island, a heavily fortified South Korean-held feature near the country’s de facto maritime border with its northern neighbor.
The unmanned aerial vehicle was said to have penetrated North Korean airspace near South Hwanghae Province’s Jangyon County and Cho Islet, a small islet off that province’s west coast.
It continued up the west coast before turning inland and heading to Pyongyang where, just a couple of hours after takeoff, it “scattered the political motivational rubbish” over areas near both foreign and defense ministry buildings as well as near the Pyongyang Metro’s Sungri Station.
KCNA included a map of the alleged flight route along with its report.
This image released by North Korea purports to show the flight path of a drone sent into Northern airspace by the South’s military earlier this month. The drone was alleged to have released anti-North propaganda.
Korean Central News Agency
“The confirmed objective and scientific evidence data expose that the intrusion by the drone is aimed at scattering the anti-DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) political motivational rubbish and that the principal of the hostile infringement upon DPRK sovereignty is none other than the puppet ROK (Republic of Korea) military gangsters,” the defense ministry said in its statement, using the official names for North and South Korea respectively.
The ministry noted that it had already issued a “last warning” to the South Korean military over its “reckless, political and military provocation.”
Monday’s announcement comes after earlier UAV overflights were reported by North Korea this month.
On October 12, the defense ministry temporarily ordered its forces to “get fully ready to open fire,” citing intrusive South Korean drone flights, per a statement carried by KCNA. Later that day, the South’s military responded that it had not deployed drones across the border.
North-South tensions are at their highest in decades amid Kim‘s recent frequent missile tests, the end of a 2018 pact meant to reduce tensions along the Demilitarized Zone and the thousands of trash-bearing balloons the North has sent toward the South since May.
Pyongyang has said the balloons are reprisals for activists’ deployments of balloons carrying South Korean pop music and television series, possession of which is strictly forbidden in the communist country.
