SEOUL: North Korea on Monday slammed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for criticising the reclusive nation's nuclear development, calling it a "conspiracy between the US and its followers".
At the 67th IAEA General Conference in Vienna last week, IAEA member states adopted a resolution urging the recalcitrant regime to suspend its nuclear weapons program and abide by its obligations under UN Security Council resolutions, reports Yonhap News Agency.
"We vehemently denounce and reject the abnormal behaviour of the IAEA which has been completely reduced to a reptile organization that serves the US away from its elementary mission as an international organization to maintain impartiality," a spokesperson for the North's nuclear power ministry said in a press statement carried by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
Stressing that North Korea withdrew from the nuclear agency in 1994, he said the IAEA has "neither qualifications nor justification to say this or that" over Pyongyang's exercise of sovereignty.
"As long as tyrannical nuclear weapons of the US and imperialist aggression forces exist on this land, the DPRK's position as a nuclear weapons state will remain unchanged and the DPRK will never tolerate the hostile forces' acts of infringing upon its sovereignty," he added, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The spokesperson then took aim at IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, slamming him for creating an "atmosphere of pressurizing the DPRK" and "spreading a false story" about an imminent seventh nuclear test to "flatter the US and the West".