US says it has not declared war on North Korea

The allegations by Ri Yong-ho, the foreign minister of North Korea who said President Donald Trump had declared war on his country has been dismissed by White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Ri, who attended this year’s UN General Assembly session, said the international community had hoped that a “war of words” would “not turn into real actions”.

“However, last weekend, Trump claimed our leadership would not be around much longer,” Ri said. “He declared a war on our country.”

However, the White House through Sanders rejected Ri’s interpretation of Trump’s tweets.

Read also: Defiant North Korea fires another missile over northern Japan

“We have not declared war against North Korea and frankly the suggestion of that is absurd,” she said.

The increasingly heated rhetoric between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is raising fears of a risk of a miscalculation by one side or the other that could have massive repercussions.

Pyongyang accuses Washington, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, of planning to invade and regularly threatens to destroy it and its Asian allies.

The US and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950s conflict ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.

 

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