North Korea called President Barack Obama “a monkey” and blamed the U.S. on Saturday for shutting down its Internet amid the hacking row over the comedy The Interview.
The country’s internet was down for nine hours and 31 minutes starting Monday.
North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy depicting an assassination of its leader Kim Jong-un. After Sony Pictures initially called off the release in a decision criticized by Obama, the movie has opened this week.
The movie made $1 million at theaters during its Christmas showings, a small, but solid sum in relation to its limited 330-theater release
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of The Interview. It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
An unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central
News agency “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest.”
He also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.
According to the North Korea commission’s spokesman, “the U.S., a big country, started disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing a tag.”
The commission said the movie was the result of a hostile U.S. policy toward North Korea, and threatened the U.S. with unspecified consequences.
source-mashable