North Korean leader Kim Jong-un vows revenge on US for Korean War crimes

Seoul: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vowed revenge on the US for the "crimes" it committed during the 1950-53 Korean War, five days before the 62nd anniversary of the truce that ended the war.

Kim said North Korea should force the US to "pay for the bloodshed of Koreans and settle accounts with it with arms, without fail", the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Thursday.

The leader made these remarks during a visit to the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, in the heart of North Korean capital Pyongyang, to mark the upcoming anniversary of the truce that ended the war but divided the Korean peninsula into two.

"He said the museum served as a centre for class education and a source of the will to take revenge upon the enemy and a historic place bearing witness to the US imperialists' monstrous atrocities," KCNA reported.

The museum, built in 1960 and further expanded and modernised last year, is frequented by foreign tourists. It exhibits war relics related to crimes North Korea attributes to the US during the war, including the killing of 35,000 North Koreans in Sinchon.

The museum has on display US airplanes and tanks and the famous USS Pueblo, a spy ship seized off North Korea's east coast in 1968.

The Korean War that pitted the Communist North, backed by China and the former USSR, against the capitalist South, supported by the US and UN forces, ended inconclusively but Pyongyang claims it won the war and celebrates the anniversary of the Korean War armistice.

The conflict, the first of the Cold War and one of the bloodiest wars in history, devastated entire cities of the Korean peninsula and claimed the lives of around 2.5 million people. (IANS/EFE)