North Korea Accuses US of Biological Warfare Schemes

North Korea accused the United States of targeting it with chemical weapons after the U.S. disclosed that live samples of anthrax were mistakenly delivered to South Korea.

The accusation was included in a letter, dated June 4 but disclosed Friday, from the North Korean ambassador Ja Song Nam at the United Nations addressed to the president of the U.N. Security Council and to the U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon.

The letter demanded that the council investigated the U.S.' biological warfare schemes”, claiming that Washington “possesses deadly weapons of mass destruction” that it intends to use against North Korea.

North Korea "strongly requests the Security Council take up the issue of the shipment of anthrax germs in order to thoroughly investigate the biological warfare schemes of the United States," Ja said in the letter.

In late May, the U.S. Defense Department disclosed that U.S. military facilities had “mistakenly” sent live anthrax bacteria, which could be used as a biological weapon, to laboratories in a U.S. army bases in South Korea, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada as well as private laboratories within the United States.

Following the incidents, the Pentagon said that an investigation was launched to determine the cause of the delivery of the samples while alive. Deliveries of inactive dead samples of anthrax are regularly conducted among laboratories which are used for military research.

Ja' letter also included a statement by the North Korean National National Defense Commission, which urged the world to consider the anthrax shipment "the gravest challenge to peace and a hideous crime aimed at genocide."

Meanwhile, the U.S. State department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters in Washington the allegations were “ridiculous,” and didn’t “merit a response.”

Anthrax can infect people in three ways: on the skin, in the digestive system or in the lungs. The inhaled anthrax is the most deadly because once it starts causing symptoms it is often too late for antibiotics to help. And the inhaled spores can hide in the lungs for months before they activate.

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