SEOUL — North Korea Sunday criticized the arrests of two men in South Korea for allegedly collecting military secrets for Pyongyang and accused Seoul of staging a “fascist crackdown”.

A 74-year-old South Korean man surnamed Lee and another with New Zealand citizenship were arrested in May for allegedly collecting information on army equipment capable of disrupting global positioning system (GPS) signals.

Seoul police said the pair obtained the military secrets after meeting a suspected North Korean agent last July in China’s northeastern border city of Dandong.

Lee was sentenced to life in prison for espionage in 1972 and was released on parole in 1990 but still retains allegiance to Pyongyang, police said after his arrest in May.

The North’s newspaper Minju Joson Sunday called the latest accusation a political smear campaign against Pyongyang to shore up sagging support for Seoul’s conservative government.

“Whenever they are faced with an extreme ruling crisis, the dictators... resort to the trite method of cooking up shocking cases including ‘spy case’,” it said in an editorial carried by the state-run KCNA.

It accused police of arresting “innocent people” as part of a “heinous plot” planned with Seoul’s conservative media outlets. — AFP