A day after North Korea witnessed an unprecedented internet outage amid the series of events surrounding a severe cyber attack on Sony Entertainment Network over the release of controversial flick ‘The Interview’, the country on Saturday launched a scathing attack at the US government by calling President Barack Obama “a monkey” and blamed his administration for shutting down its internet services.
National Defence Commission, the North’s most powerful and top governing body led by President Kim Jong-un, accused President Obama of being the man behind the release of “The Interview”.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesperson at the policy department of the commission said in a statement.
“The Interview”, a satirical comedy by Sony Pictures, has reignited the tensions between North Korea and the United States as it features an assassination plot of the North Korean President.
The Commission described the controversial movie as illegal, reactionary and dishonest.
“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 North Korea commission’s spokesman said.
Meanwhile, there was no immediate reaction from the White House over the North Korean stand.
Last week, Obama held North Korea responsible for the cyber attack on Sony Pictures, saying the findings of the investigation carried by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had strong leads suggesting the North’s involvement in the cyber crime that resulted in the leak of many confidential emails and data and also threatened the Sony employees and their near ones against releasing ‘The Interview’.
However, the accusations were turned down by the North and the country had also proposed a joint investigation with the United States into the hacking.
This is not the first time when North Korea has lashed out at the American President and other top US and South Korean officials with its insulting remarks. Earlier this year, the North had compared US Secretary of State John Kerry with a wolf having a “hideous” lantern jaw. It has also called South Korean President Park Geun-hye a “prostitute”. In May this year, the news agency of North Korea had published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey”.