NK’s call for joint drone investigation spurned

Cheong Wa Dae on Tuesday spurned North Korea’s call to conduct a joint investigation into three aerial drones that crashed near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) which the South claims were sent by the North for surveillance purposes.

“In no crime case would a suspect be allowed to investigate the evidence of his own crime,” a Cheong Wa Dae official told reporters. “We will continue with our investigation into the drones in a scientific manner which will be more than enough to confirm that the drones came from the North.”

While “smoking-gun” evidence has yet to be found, the Ministry of National Defense announced last week that it is certain the North sent three unmanned aerial vehicles which crashed near the South’s side of the inter-Korean border.

The comments came as a response to a proposal late on Monday made by the North’s powerful National Defense Commission (NDC) for Seoul and Pyongyang to jointly establish the truth about the crashed aerial vehicles.

The NDC further accused South Korea of fabricating the case to focus responsibility and blame on North Korea.

“It is an inveterate bad habit of the South Korean authorities to cook up shocking cases and kick up anti-North Korean confrontation hysteria by linking those cases with North Korea,” the commission said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.

It said North Korea remains unchanged regarding its proposal to jointly investigate a number of incidents, including the sinking of the naval corvette Cheonan, for which South Korea blames the North.

The South Korean warship Cheonan sank near the western sea border on March 26, 2010, causing the deaths of 46 South Korean sailors.

An international investigation team led by South Korea concluded that North Korea torpedoed the vessel.

North Korea was excluded from the investigation for similar reasons as for the drone case and Pyongyang still denies any involvement in the 2010 attack.

Meanwhile, Pyongyang also refuted Seoul’s “tentative” claims made about the drone case.

The North said the word “giyong,” meaning “start using” in English and was written in one of the drones to record the launching date of the plane according to Seoul government, is never used by North Korean people.

“There is no explanation about the word ‘giyong’ in the large Korean dictionary in the North,” the North said.

Also, commenting on six fingerprints, unregistered in the South Korean database but collected from one of the drones according to Seoul, it pointed out that numerous foreigners live in the South who don’t have their fingerprints registered to refute the South’s claims.

Against South Korea’s estimation that the flight range of the drones was between 180 to 300 kilometers, the North said unmanned planes weighing 12 kilograms cannot even fly when equipped with 300 kilometers-worth fuel which weighs 5 kilograms.

Besides, the North opined that photos of the presidential office and military infrastructures found in the drones and the color of the aerial vehicles are not conclusive evidence of the North’s involvement. By Chung Min-uck The korea times