North Korea calls US President Barack Obama a ‘monkey’ as Sony hacking row continues

[KimJongUn]

North Korea calls US President Barack Obama a ‘monkey’ as Sony hacking row continues

Pyongyang describes controversial Sony move The Interview as illegal, dishonest and reactionary as it says US president is 'like a monkey in a tropical forest'

PUBLISHED : Saturday, 27 December, 2014, 1:16pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 27 December, 2014, 1:19pm

Associated Press in Seoul

North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-un visits a greenhouse for growing vegetables accompanied by military top brass. Photo: EPA

North Korea called President Barack Obama “a monkey” and on Saturday blamed the US for shutting down its internet amid the hacking row over the film comedy The Interview.

North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy depicting an assassination of its leader Kim Jong-un. After Sony Pictures initially called off the release in a decision criticised by Obama, the movie opened this week.

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defence Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of The Interview. It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

US President Barack Obama has been described as a 'monkey' by North Korea’s powerful National Defence Commission. Photo: Xinhua

He also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, after the US had promised to respond to the Sony hack.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.

According to the North Korea commission’s spokesman, “the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing a tag.”

The commission said the movie was the results of a hostile US policy toward North Korea, and threatened unspecified consequences.

North Korea and the US remain technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes and its alleged human rights abuses. The US currently stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.

Sony Pictures' movie "The Interview" opens on Christmas Day in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: AFP