North Korea Faked Submarine Missile Launch Photos, Say Experts
By Aiswarya Lakshmi
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Photos and footages showing a North Korean missile launched from a submarine were manipulated by state propagandists, according to an analysis by a California-based think tank, says a report in Reuters.
North Korea, heavily sanctioned by the United States and United Nations for its missile and nuclear tests, may still be years away from developing the technology.
North Korean state television aired footage on Friday of the latest test, said to have taken place in December. Unlike a previous SLBM test in May, it had not been announced at the time.
"The rocket ejected, began to light, and then failed catastrophically," said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the California-based Middlebury Institute's James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).
North Korean propagandists used rudimentary editing techniques to crop and flip old video footage of an earlier submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test and Scud missile launch, the video analysis showed.