North Korea factory
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (R) gives field guidance during a visit to Pyongyang Biological Technology Research Institute under KPA Unit 810, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang June 6, 2015. KCNA/ Reuters

North Korea is challenging accusations made by Western media and the U.S. Congress that claim a Pyongyang biotechnology facility is also capable of producing biological weapons like anthrax. North Korea said the entirety of Congress should come inspect the facility themselves.

“A thousand pairs of ears cannot match a pair of eyes,” a spokesman for the National Defense Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea said exclusively to the state-run Korean Central News Agency’s Korean-language dispatch, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday. The spokesman insisted the facility was used solely to manufacture pesticides. “Come here right now, with all the 535 members of the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the imbecile secretaries and deputy secretaries of the government who have made their voices hoarse screaming for new sanctions,” the spokesman said.

In the English-language version of the KCNA report, the spokesman called the allegations from the West a “smear campaign” used to “kick off hysteria against the DPRK, denying stark reality.” He also took shots at South Korea’s President Park Geun Hye, who has expressed concern over the anthrax claims.

“The South Korean puppet forces, sheltering in doghouses of the U.S., are fated to exist only when they bark at its prodding as they live on the crusts of bread thrown by it,” the report said.

The accusations came after a research report by 38North, a respected blog run by the Johns Hopkins University U.S.-Korea Institute, said that the pesticide facility pictured in a previous KCNA report is technologically equipped to produce biological weapons.

“The modern equipment seen in the images reveal that North Korea is not only maintaining a biological weapons capability, but also has an active large-scale sanctions busting effort to illicitly procure the equipment for the Pyongyang Biotechnical Institute,” the report said. “This effort runs counter to international treaties, regimes and national laws that aim to prevent the spread of biological weapons, the equipment and chemicals used to make them and their means of delivery.”