South Korea on Tuesday rejected North Korea's demand that the rival Koreas conduct a joint investigation into drones that Seoul claimed Pyongyang had sent to the South for spying purposes.
South Korea said last week that it believes North Korea was the origin of three unmanned aerial vehicles that crashed near the heavily guarded border area in the South, though conclusive evidence has yet to be found.
"In no case would a suspect be allowed to investigate evidence of his own crime," a presidential official told reporters. He asked not to be identified, citing policy.
He also said South Korea will continue its investigations into the drones in a scientific manner to confirm that the drones came from North Korea.
His comment came hours after the North's powerful National Defense Commission accused South Korea of fabricating the latest case to shift the responsibility for the acute inter-Korean relations to the North.
"It is an inveterate bad habit of the South Korean authorities to cook up shocking cases and kick up anti-(North Korean) confrontation hysteria by linking those cases with (North Korea)," the commission said in an English-language statement carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea "remains unchanged in its stand to jointly investigate all cases, including the Cheonan case, as (South Korea) claims the North was involved in them," it said, referring to the South Korean warship that sank near their disputed western sea border, killing 46 South Korean sailors.
A South Korean-led international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed the warship on March 26, 2010, though Pyongyang has denied its responsibility.
At that time, the North also offered to send its team of investigators to the South for a joint probe into the sinking of the warship, a demand rejected by Seoul.
Defense ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said in a briefing that North Korea distorted basic facts about the drones to cover up its provocations.
"North Korea's offer to launch a joint investigation into the drone incident is a mean psychological tactic to divide South Korea, which is unworthy of consideration," Kim said.
On Monday, a team of American experts in drones and software technology arrived in Seoul to help South Korean investigators analyze the global positioning data of the crashed drones, which officials say could provide a smoking gun to their origin.
On Friday, South Korea's defense ministry said the three drones had batteries with inscriptions that featured words in the North Korean spelling standard.
Words indicating dates of use and expiration -- "kiyong" (use) and "nalja" (date) -- and six fingerprints unregistered in the South Korean database were collected from one of the drones.
Though the two Koreas use the same Korean alphabet called Hangul, they use different spelling standards and dialect. South Korean spelling for the word date is "naltsa" whereas the North Korean version is "nalja."
South Korea's defense ministry said Friday that there is enough circumstantial evidence to prove the North's involvement in the drone incursion.
On Tuesday, the North's commission said North Korean people never use the word "kiyong" on any product. "There is no explanation about the word 'kiyong' in the large Korean dictionary in the North," the commission said. (Yonhap)
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