Need a North Korean Missile? Call the Cairo Embassy<br />Egypt has purchased North Korean weapons and allowed North Korean diplomats to use their Cairo embassy<br />as a base for military sales across the region, American and United Nations officials say.<br />United Nations inspectors and North Korean defectors say the Cairo embassy has become a bustling arms bazaar for covert sales of North Korean missiles<br />and cut-price Soviet-era military hardware across a band of North Africa and the Middle East.<br />In response to questions about the United Nations finding, the State Information Service said this past week: "The relevant Egyptian authorities have undertaken all the necessary measures in relation to the North Korean ship in full transparency<br />and under the supervision" of United Nations officials.<br />After the Trump administration slashed aid last summer, Egyptian officials said they were cutting military ties to North Korea, reducing the size of its Cairo embassy<br />and monitoring the activities of North Korean diplomats.<br />But now the statue has come to signify another aspect of Egypt’s ties to North Korea: a furtive trade in illegal weapons<br />that has upset President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s otherwise cozy relationship with the United States, set off a painful cut in military aid and drawn unremitting scrutiny from United Nations inspectors.<br />In addition, Washington worries that North Korea, a longtime supplier of ballistic missile technology to Egypt, is still supplying<br />missile parts, said Andrea Berger, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.<br />In November 2016, the United States and the United Nations sanctioned the ambassador, Pak Chun-il, describing<br />him as an agent of North Korea’s largest arms company, the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation.
