North Korean Freighter Said to Be Returning to Port

MSN Philippines News

By CHOE SANG-HUN

EOUL, South Korea — South Korea said Monday that a North Korean freighter suspected of carrying banned cargo was expected to return to home port, as U.S. officials claimed that international sanctions had forced the ship to turn back.

The 2,000-ton Kang Nam 1 left North Korea in mid-June, and was believed to be heading for Myanmar only days after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution that banned the North from nuclear and ballistic missile tests and called for a global embargo on its trade in weapons.


The American Navy tracked the ship amid suspicions that the North was using the voyage to test Washington’s will to enforce the sanctions. Late last month, the ship turned around and began sailing homeward. On Sunday, Vice President Joseph Biden said the ship turned back because the U.N. sanctions prevented it from entering any port.

The ship was sailing in international waters between China and the Korean Peninsula on Monday and was likely to enter North Korean waters within the day, Won Tae-jae, a spokesman of the South Korean Defense Ministry, said Monday.

North Korea has not explained why the ship appeared to have canceled its voyage.

American authorities monitored the ship on the high seas but did not stop and search it — _ a move the North said it would interpret as an act of war _ while working with regional governments to inspect the ship under the U.N. mandate if it entered their ports.

The South Korean authorities suspect the Kang Nam 1 was carrying a cargo of rifles and rocket launchers for Myanmar, the South Korean Yonhap news agency reported on Monday, quoting an unnamed government source. If the ship indeed was carrying weapons, aborting its voyage would be seen as a victory for the sanctions regime.

The Security Council imposed the sanctions after the North tested a nuclear weapon on May 25.

In a gesture of defiance, meanwhile, North Korea fired seven ballistic missiles Saturday during the July 4 Independence Day holiday in the United States.

South Korea’s mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported Monday that the missiles fired on Saturday included three Scud-ER missiles, which have a range of up to 620 miles and can hit Japan.

The Defense Ministry here said it could not confirm the report. But South Korean officials have told reporters that the North appeared to have fired five Scuds and two Rodong missiles.

Five of them plunged into the same zone in the sea between the North and Japan, indicating that the North was improving its firing accuracy, they said.

“Some of it seems like almost attention-seeking behavior,” Mr. Biden told the American television network ABC on Sunday, referring to the North’s latest missile tests. “ I don’t want to give the attention.”

The North Korean cargo ship turned around because the United States has “succeeded in uniting the most important and critical countries to North Korea on a common path of further isolating North Korea,” Mr. Biden said. “There was no place they could go with certitude that they would not be, in fact, at that point boarded and searched.”

Philip S. Goldberg, the American diplomat coordinating enforcement of the U.N. sanctions, visited Malaysia on Monday for talks with officials there. Unconfirmed press reports in South Korean said that Washington has found bank accounts in Malaysia used by North Korea for its illicit trading and sought to shut them down. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman could not confirm the reports but pledged that his government will work with the United States.

“If they have evidence, we’ll be most willing to work together to solve this problem,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Goldberg was in Beijing last week to discuss sanctions enforcement with officials in China, the North’s largest trade partner and aid provider.