North Korea lashed out at Japan on Thursday, dismissing as "misinformation" a report earlier this week that more than 200 people were feared dead after a tunnel collapse at the North's main nuclear test site following the country's sixth atomic test in early September.
Japan's TV Asahi, citing unnamed sources in the isolated country, reported Tuesday that the accident at the Punggye-ri test site had killed scores around Sept. 10. The Japan Times could not independently confirm the report, but North Korea rarely acknowledges major accidents, and any incident related to its nuclear program would be especially taboo.
The North's Korean Central News Agency claimed in a commentary Thursday that Japanese authorities had given their blessing to the report as part of a bid "to secure a pretext for sending the Japan 'Self-Defense Forces' into the Korean peninsula on their own initiative by building up the public opinion over [the] 'nuclear threat' from the DPRK."