AFP, SEOUL (AFP) Oct 23, 2003-North Korea has exported some 400 Scud missiles to Middle East countries since the mid-1980s, South Korea's defense ministry said Thursday.
Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen were the best customers for North Korean Scuds in the region, the ministry said in a parliamentary report.
“Since the middle of the 1980s, North Korea has exported 400-odd Scud missiles along with missile-related parts to the Middle East region,” the report said, according to ministry spokesman Kim Ki-Beom.
The report did not say how much the communist state earned from the missile exports, but Yonhap news agency put the figure at 110 million dollars.
Missile exports have been a major source of hard currency earnings for cash-strapped North Korea, which is accused by Washington of being a leading global proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
The Spanish navy acting on US intelligence data seized an unflagged North Korean cargo ship carrying 15 Scuds to Yemen off the Yemeni coast last year.
The United States imposed new sanctions in July on a North Korean trading firm involved in the missile exports to Yemen on top of its existing sanctions on Pyongyang.
Washington is worried about not only the Stalinist state's peddling in missiles but also its development of longer-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting US territory.
Pyongyang stunned the world in August 1998 by test-firing its ballistic Taepodong-1 missile over Japan with a range of up to 2,000 kilometersmiles) without any prior notice.
It claimed the launch was to put a satellite into orbit.
The report also said Pyongyang spent some 400 million dollars over five years to 2002 in buying fighter jets, tanks, helicopters and other weaponry parts largely from China and Russia.
North Korea has depended on international aid to help feed its 22 million people since the mid-1990s due to a combination of economic mismanagement and national disasters.
