NK accuses Abe of playing up nuclear threat to win election

Pyongyang, Oct 30: North Korea has accused Japan's ruling party of playing up a nuclear threat posed by Pyongyang to achieve a huge win in last weekend's general election. The North's Korea-Asia-Pacific Peace Committee also criticised Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for planning to ask US President Donald Trump to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang when he visits Tokyo early next month. In a statement carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency, the committee claimed that in campaigning ahead of the Oct. 22 election, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (IDP) "kicked up a hysteric anti-(Pyongyang) racket, noisily trumpeting about the story of nuclear threat from the north and solution to the abduction of Japanese." The LDP won 284 of the 465 seats in the election, and together with its smaller coalition partner, Komeito, secured a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. During the election campaign, Abe focused on Japan's heightened security concerns given North Korea's continued testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in defiance of UN resolutions forbidding such activity and crippling economic sanctions, a Kyodo report added. Earlier this week, Japan's Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso attributed the ruling party's electoral victory to North Korea's rising threat, a view he altered on Friday in the face of criticism from opposition lawmakers. "Abe and his group should know that they are playing a dangerous gamble by putting the prospect of their island country and the destiny of their people at stake," the North Korean statement said. UNI