North Korea accuses CIA of plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un

North Korea on Friday accused the US Central Intelligence Agency and South Korea’s intelligence service of a plot to attack its “supreme leadership” with a biochemical weapon and said such a “pipe dream” could never succeed.

Tension on the Korean peninsula has been high for weeks, driven by concern that North Korea might conduct its sixth nuclear test or test launch another ballistic missile in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.

Reclusive North Korea warned this week that US hostility had brought the region to the brink of nuclear war.

The North’s Ministry of State Security released a statement saying “the last-ditch effort” of US “imperialists” and the South had gone “beyond the limits”.

“The Central Intelligence Agency of the US and the National Intelligence Service (NIS) of south Korea, hotbed of evils in the world, hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK and those acts have been put into the extremely serious phase of implementation after crossing the threshold of the DPRK,” the North’s KCNA news agency quoted the statement as saying, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.