CINA

North Korea has again criticized the top U.S. envoy to Seoul for making provocative remarks about the communist country, calling him a ``tyrant,'' a news report said Sunday.

U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow labeled the North a ``criminal regime'' early this month, citing Pyongyang's alleged arms dealing, money laundering and counterfeiting.

Since the remarks, North Korea has repeatedly called on South Korea to expel Vershbow for slandering the North. Pyongyang has also called Vershbow a ``political rogue'' and his remarks a ``declaration of war.''

``It is clear (Vershbow) is a tyrant wearing the mask of a diplomat,'' the North's Rodong Sinmun newspaper said Sunday in a commentary, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

Vershbow's comments have also drawn rebukes from South Korean officials. Kim Won-wung, a lawmaker of the ruling Uri Party, recently warned he would campaign for the expulsion of Vershbow unless he moderates his criticism of North Korea.

U.S. allegations of the North's involvement in counterfeiting have been a major obstacle to resuming talks on Pyongyang's nuclear arms program. North Korea has dismissed the allegations as a lie and threatened to boycott the talks with the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia unless Washington lifts the sanctions.

In a separate report on Saturday, the North urged South Korea to apologize for Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung's recent remarks that the North poses a military threat, calling them an intolerable insult and mockery.

``The military threat on the Korean Peninsula is not coming from the North but from South Korea where the U.S. troops are stationed,'' said a spokesman for the Committee for the North's Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, according to the North's Korean Central News Agency.

The unidentified spokesman also described the Korean Peninsula as a touch-and-go situation in

which a war may break out any moment due to war moves of the U.S. and South Korea. It did not say what it meant by war moves.

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