North Korea Calls Report of Spy a Lie

North Korea accused Washington and Seoul on Monday of fabricating a story about a suspected Pyongyang spy being shot in the South, and analysts said the affair could open a new round of wrangling between Pyongyang and the U.S.-led U.N. Command.

Last Tuesday, the South Korean Defense Ministry said an infiltrator it identified as a North Korean agent was shot and killed by South Korean border troops.

It said another person survived the shooting and slipped back across the border. On Friday, South Korea said that a rifle and other equipment were found near the spot of the shooting and that they were thought to belong to a third agent.

“The United States and the South Korean authorities invented another anti-DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] incident of ‘infiltration of an armed spy,’ ” the North Korean official daily Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary Monday.

“The ‘incident’ is really a clumsy drama,” the paper said. The commentary was carried by the official Korean Central News Agency monitored in Tokyo.

Seoul analysts of North Korean affairs said the episode could open a new round of wrangling between Pyongyang and the U.N. Command, a signatory to the armistice agreement that halted the 1950-53 Korean War.

Pyongyang announced last year that it was pulling out of the Military Armistice Commission set up in 1953 to oversee the truce.

The North has denounced the truce as “a scrap of paper” and demanded that it be replaced with a full-scale peace treaty with the United States, shutting out archfoe South Korea.