North Korea has harshly condemned the South Korean government for hastily pushing for the conclusion of a controversial military pact with Japan, calling it "a hideous act of treachery" and "a sinister intention to prolong its rule at stake" amid the worst-ever chaos brought on by the influence-peddling scandal involving President Park Geun-hye's confidante.

On Monday, Seoul tentatively signed the intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo despite strong objections at home. The General Security of Military Information Agreement is designed to better counter mounting North Korean missile threats. The opposition parties immediately submitted a resolution to scrap the pact.

"This hideous act of treachery aimed to stifle the fellow countrymen in the north in league with the sworn enemy of the nation (Japan) is a dangerous act of pushing the already tense situation on the Korean Peninsula and in the region to the worst phase," a spokesman for the North's Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee said Thursday in a statement. The committee, an organ of the North's ruling Workers' Party, is in charge of inter-Korean affairs.

The pact, if formally concluded, will give Japan, which is always looking for an opportunity to reinvade the peninsula, a legal way to start a war with the North, the spokesman said.

The pact will also degenerate South Korea into a double colony of the United States and Japan, and an advanced base for aggression, the spokesman said.

"Lurking behind the (Park government's) hasty move for the conclusion of the agreement with Japan is their sinister intention to prolong their rule at stake," the spokesman added. (Yonhap)