By Kang Seung-woo
North Korea has been left off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism for the fifth straight year, despite a recent third nuclear test and repeated threats of war.
The U.S. Department of State released its country reports on terrorism for 2012 on Thursday, including Syria, Iran, Sudan and Cuba.
The communist country was first put on the list after the downing of a Korean Air flight over Myanmar in 1987, which killed all 115 people aboard, but the United States rescinded the designation of North Korea in October 2008 as a state sponsor of terrorism after the nation promised to disable a plutonium plant and let inspectors verify that it had stopped its nuclear program.
“The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987,” the annual report said.
It added that the United States re-certified North Korea as “not cooperating fully” with U.S. counterterrorism efforts in May.
The report also said that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reiterated its concern about the DPRK’s failure to address “significant deficiencies” in its anti-money laundering or combating the financing of terrorism.
The exclusion of North Korea from the list comes despite Republican Senator Marco Rubio and other Congressmen pushing the Obama administration to rename the North as a state sponsor of terrorism due to its repeated saber-rattling.
The U.S. government rejected the calls, saying it has yet to find enough evidence to relist North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The report said that Al-Qaeda has been significantly degraded, with dozens of senior leaders including Osama bin Laden having been removed. It also said Iran increased its support of international terrorist-related activities to a level not seen in two decades, adding that last year Iran and Hezbollah's terrorist activity reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa.