North Korea has ripped into Donald Trump, likening him to Adolf Hitler - a week after calling the US President a "lunatic".

Tensions have been escalating between the two nations following the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested in North Korea and sent home in a coma after 18 months, and in the face of Pyongyang's military and nuclear ambitions.

Moon Jae-in, the new leader of North Korea's neighbour and arch enemy, South Korea, is headed to Washington for talks this week.

North Korea's state news agency KCNA said: "The America-first principle... advocates the world domination by recourse to military means just as was the case with Hitler's concept of world occupation."

And it went on to accuse Mr Trump of "following Hitler's dictatorial politics" to divide others into two categories, "friends and foes" in order to justify "suppression".


It is not the first time the secretive state has evoked Hitler in propaganda against the US.

After George W Bush branded the North, along with Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil", Pyongyang hit back, saying the then-US president was a "tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade" and a "political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality".

America has been angling for tougher sanctions against North Korea because of the states' insistence on developing missiles to carry nuclear warheads greater distances.

KCNA said the US' policy of blocking medical supplies was "an unethical and inhumane act, far exceeding the degree of Hitler's blockade of Leningrad".

And it added: "The Trump way of thinking that the whole world may be sacrificed, just for the better living of the US, has put even its allies and stooges in a pretty fix."

Mr Moon is new in the job, but has already signalled he will move to pressure China on tightening the screws around North Korea.