Phl seeks US help on North Korea rocket

The Philippine government said yesterday that it anticipated US help to track a North Korean long-range rocket, part of which is expected to land off the Philippines.

“Of course we need the help of the United States to monitor the path because we don’t have that capability,” Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin told reporters.

“But with our alliances, we will be provided with the necessary information. We should know the details so that we will know how to inform and warn our people who will be in the (rocket’s) path,” he said.

DND spokesman Peter Paul Galvez said they are monitoring the rocket launching and its supposed flight path.

“What we can do is monitor and we’ll ask appropriate agencies with capabilities to know more about this,” Galvez said.

“We will try to know more about the details of the flight path, so we can appropriately warn people of the possible areas which will be affected by the debris,” he said.

North Korea announced last week it would launch the rocket to place a satellite in orbit between April 12 and 16, insisting it was for peaceful space research.

But the US and other nations see North Korea’s plan as a thinly veiled long-range missile test, which would breach the UN ban and violate last month’s denuclearization deal with Washington.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency simply dismissed such criticism as a “sinister provocation by hostile forces.”

It said that North Korea has a right to peaceful development in space, adding its government had notified international aviation and maritime bodies of the rocket’s flight path.

Next month’s rocket launch is timed to coincide with mass celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the nation’s founding president, Kim Il-sung.

A previous North Korean long-range rocket in 2009 flew over Japanese territory and the boosters landed safely in waters off Japan.