North Korea on Thursday denied reports that it is helping Syria build chemical weapons, the Korean Central News Agency reported on Friday. A spokesperson at the Institute for American Studies, an agency under the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the reports were a “preposterous fabrication” by the United States.

“As had been elucidated several times, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea does not have a single record of developing, producing and stockpiling a chemical weapon,” the spokesperson said while dismissing the unreleased United Nations report that Pyongyang has been providing technical assistance for developing chemical weapons to Damascus for more than a decade. North Korea is said to have supplied acid-resistant tiles, corrosion-resistant valves and pipes to the Syrian regime. Moreover, Pyongyang’s missile experts have been identified at Syrian weapon-manufacturing sites.

The statement added that the United States was the first country in the world to use chemical weapons. Besides, it said, the US is a “criminal state” and a “cancer to global peace”, which had “massacred 50,000 innocent people in the northern half of Korea using biochemical weapons during the Korean war”.

North Korea said that the United States had influenced the United Nations Security Council to “cook up the theory of cooperation between North Korea and Syria” in order to impose more sanctions and install a “full-scale sea blockade”, and justify an invasion of Syria.

In June 2017, a report by the international watchdog confirmed that the banned nerve agent Sarin gas was used in a deadly attack in northern Syria on April 4, 2017.