Seoul: North Korea on Friday launched a missile that flew over northern Japan before plunging into the Pacific Ocean, just a day after Pyongyang threatened to sink Japan.
The still-unidentified missile was launched around 6.30 a.m. (local time) from east of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, according to South Korea’s military Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The officials said that the rocket could have reached an altitude of 770 km and flew for a total of some 3,700 km. According to the Japanese government’s missile alert system, the missile overflew the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and fell into the Pacific Ocean, Efe news reported.
Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters that the missile fell into the ocean some 2,000 km from the town of Erimo in eastern Hokkaido without being seen to do so by any ships or aircraft in that area.
Suga also said that no damage had been reported as a result of the missile. Specifically he said that no potentially dangerous debris had fallen from the missile, confirming that no aircraft or ships in the region have been hit or damaged as a result of the launch and missile’s flight.
The South Korean President’s Office immediately called a meeting of that country’s National Security Council and troops of the Asian nation undertook a ballistic missile test in the Sea of Japan to the east of the Korean Peninsula in response to the launch.
This is the first missile launch by North Korea since the end of August, when the Kim Jong-un regime fired another projectile over northern Japan, and the first weapons test since Pyongyang carried out its sixth, and to date most powerful, nuclear test on September 3.
On Thursday, North Korea threatened to sink Japan and said the US should be “beaten to death like a rabid dog” after the two countries spearheaded fresh UN Security Council sanctions in response to the regimes nuclear test earlier this month, a media report said.
The Korea Asia-Pacific peace committee, which oversees North Korea’s relations with the outside world, described the UN Security Council, which passed a new round of sanctions earlier this week, as a “tool of evil” in the pay of Washington, and called for it to be broken up, reported the Guardian newspaper.
“The four islands of the (Japanese) archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche,” the committee said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.
It is the first time that Pyongyang has issued an explicit threat to Japan since it fired a medium-range ballistic missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in August end.
“Japan is no longer needed to exist near us,” the committee said.
The 15-member Security Council voted unanimously in support of a US-drafted resolution condemning the missile test conducted by North Korea on September 3 and imposed measures that include a ban on its textile imports and restrictions on oil exports to the country.
In response, the committee said the US should be “beaten to death like a rabid dog” for the “heinous sanctions resolution”.
“Let’s reduce the US mainland into ashes and darkness. Let’s vent our spite with mobilisation of all retaliation means which have been prepared till now,” it said.
Japan’s top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, described the statement as “extremely provocative and egregious”.
A new report has claimed that the detonation of what North Korea claimed was a hydrogen bomb involved a device with an estimated yield of 250 kilotons — making it far more powerful than initially thought, the report said.
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK claimed on Thursday that US and North Korean officials had met “secretly” on the sidelines of a security forum in Switzerland earlier this month.
The report did not offer details, but said that Choe Kang-il, deputy Director General for North American affairs at the North Korean Foreign Ministry, and Evans Revere, a former senior official at the State Department, had raised North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear tests.
While Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has refused to consider negotiations unless Pyongyang abandons its nuclear weapons programme, an MP had claimed that support was rising inside the governing Liberal Democratic party for possible engagement with the regime, said the report.
