N. Korea Calls Ship Seizure 'Piracy'

North Korea is accusing the United States of piracy in the seizure of a ship carrying missile shipments to Yemen.

One day after finding North Korean Scud missiles hidden aboard a cargo ship in the Arabian Sea, the United States agreed to let the ship complete its voyage and deliver the missiles to the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden. In return, Yemen promised not to buy more such weapons from North Korea, a country denounced by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil."

"This is an unpardonable piracy that wantonly encroached upon the sovereignty of the DPRK," the Korean Central News Agency said Friday, referring to the communist country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The brief report said the United States was forced to release the ship after realizing that it had no legal grounds to seize it "in broad daylight" and "in the open seas."

The report said the United States "wantonly" violated routine trade between countries.

It was President Bush who made the decision to release the Scuds to Yemen, reports CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts, agreeing with his advisers that the United States had no legal basis to seize them. But the White House expressed confidence that Yemen will buy no more missiles or missile parts from North Korea.

American intelligence had shadowed the Cambodian freighter Sosan for weeks, from the time it left North Korea until it was finally boarded by American commandos off the Horn of Africa. In the hold, hidden under bags of cement, were 15 Scud missiles and missile parts destined for the Middle East.

The White House was worried that the missiles may have been headed for Iraq, which terrorized Israel and Saudi Arabia with Scuds during the Gulf War. But the destination turned out to be Yemen, a crucial Arab ally of the U.S. in the war on terror. Yemeni officials claimed it was the final shipment of an old order and demanded the missiles be handed over.

"We had assurance these missiles were for Yemeni defensive purposes and under no circumstances would they be going anywhere else," said Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Still, the incident is troubling to the White House. Yemen is a frontline state in the war on terror – it's where the USS Cole was bombed and where a senior al Qaeda member was recently taken out by a Predator drone. The Pentagon says Yemen had promised last year that it would buy no more missile technology from North Korea.

But some foreign policy experts don't think Yemen can be trusted.

"I think they're duplicitous and they're disingenuous the way they talk," said Leon Charney, former foreign policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter. "I don't think they have any concept what it is to be, as we understand it, very upright in their commitments to us or to anybody else."

The agreement to release the missiles was reached through unusual high-level diplomacy involving Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the one hand, and President Ali Abdallah Salih of Yemen on the other.

Spanish authorities, whose naval forces intercepted the ship in the Arabian Sea, also were deeply involved in the awkward negotiations, as was Cambodia, in southeast Asia.

Bush administration officials acknowledged that boarding the ship and taking charge of its cargo probably violated international law. But administration decision-makers were guided by concern about an influx of weapons into the Persian Gulf region just as the United States is considering force to disarm Iraq.

Once Spanish and U.S. inspectors climbed aboard, they found "irregularities in the cargo and the documentation and the Scuds were found on board the ship," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

"So a ship like this acting suspiciously in a sensitive part of the world carrying what might be missiles from North Korea is obviously going to get a lot of attention," Boucher said.

Powell denounced North Korea as "one of the great proliferators on the face of the earth." He said the United States has been trying to make the case worldwide that the Communist regime posed dangers.

Ironically, the Bush administration has not tried to negotiate curbs on missile exports with North Korea since it broke other accords by proceeding with a nuclear weapons program, thereby convincing U.S. officials it could not be trusted to keep its word.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters in Qatar, said the ship was intercepted because "there were questions about its flag, questions about its cargo and questions about its destination." The ship's contents were not on its manifest, he said.

Forces from the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau had been aboard the detained vessel since Tuesday awaiting orders on what to do with it and the weapons, Pentagon officials said.

The master of the ship said it was from Cambodia, but officials of the Southeast Asian country informed the United States they were not sure but approved boarding the ship, a U.S. official said.

The crew, meanwhile, claimed to be Cambodians but may have been North Koreans, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.