Kim Jong Un insists he's definitely not peddling chemical weapons to Syria

North Korea Thursday dismissed a recent UN report accusing Pyongyang of supplying Syria with materials for chemical weapons, calling it a “preposterous fabrication” cooked up by Washington.

“This is only a mean trick to fan an atmosphere of sanctions against the DPRK and enforce a full-scale sea blockade and to justify its military invasion into Syria,” a spokesperson at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pyongyang told state-run news agency KCNA.

The statement slammed the U.S. as “the first user of chemical weapons in the world,” claiming Washington it massacred 50,000 innocent people with “bio-chemical weapons” during the Korean War in the 1950s. “It is clear that [the U.S.] is a cancer of global peace as a biggest supplier of weapons in the world,” the spokesperson added.

An unpublished UN report was leaked earlier this week, claiming two North Korean shipments were intercepted en route to Syria in the last six months.

The report also claimed technicians from the rogue regime are being employed at chemical weapons and missile facilities inside Syria.

“As we have clearly said several times, our republic does not develop, produce and stockpile chemical weapons and opposes chemical weapons themselves,” the North Korean official responded.

But analysts and diplomats have backed the UN report, which verifies a long-standing belief that North Korea has cooperated with Syria on the manufacture of a chemical arsenal.

“This is consistent with what has been said for quite some time about Syrian-North Korean cooperation on chemical weapons,” Ambassador Robert Gallucci, U.S. chief negotiator for 1994 nuclear weapons talks with North Korea, told VICE News earlier this week. “There is a Syrian-North Korean connection in weapons of mass destruction.”

Cover image: This picture taken on September 3, 2017 and released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 4, 2017 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending a meeting with a committee of the Workers' Party of Korea about the test of a hydrogen bomb, at an unknown location. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)