Seoul - North Korea threatened yesterday to end its freeze on missile launches and nuclear development, blaming what it called the "brigandish" attitude of the new US administration.
Making its strongest official attack yet on the Bush administration, the isolated communist state said it would not be forced into giving up its arms.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said the US had not kept to a 1994 accord under which Pyongyang froze its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
The spokesman, in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, warned that a missile launch moratorium begun in September 1999 would be abandoned unless the US government moved towards a permanent agreement.