A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea made the following statement on Tuesday:

The United States committed an unlawful and outrageous act of dispossessing our cargo ship by forcibly taking it to Samoa (U.S.), linking the ship to the "sanctions resolutions" of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and its domestic "sanctions acts", all being imposed against the DPRK.

The UNSC "sanctions resolutions" on the DPRK, which the U.S. has employed as one of the grounds for its dispossession of our cargo ship, have flagrantly infringed upon the sovereignty of our state, and therefore, we have categorically rejected and condemned the whole of them all along.

Moreover, the United States' impudent act of forcing other countries into observance of its domestic law is indeed a wanton violation of the universally accepted international laws which make clear that in no case can a sovereign state be an object of jurisdiction of other countries.

The latest U.S. act constitutes an extension of the American method of calculation for bringing the DPRK to its knees by means of "maximum pressure" and an outright denial of the underlying spirit of the June 12 DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement that has committed to establish new bilateral relations.

The U.S. should ponder over the consequences its heinous act might have on the future developments and immediately return our ship.

The time when the U.S. held sway over the world at its own free will is gone long ago, and it would be a biggest miscalculation if the U.S. thought that the DPRK is among the countries where the American-style logic of "strength" might work for.

We will carefully watch every move of the United States hereafter.