North Korea calls president Obama a monkey after blaming US for shutting down its internet

North Korea has compared president Barack Obama to a monkey and blamed the United States for shutting down its inteet after it was accused of hacking Sony Pictures over The Interview movie.

The communist regime said the US president was behind the release of the film and described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

‘Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," an unidentified spokesman at the commission"s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the country"s state news service, Korean Central News Agency.

In May, the news agency published a dispatch saying Obama had the ‘shape of a monkey."

President Barack Obama, with first lady Michelle Obama (Picture: AP)

North Korea had denied involvement in the crippling cyberattack, but expressed anger over the comedy, which depicted the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Sony Pictures initially called off the release of the film, citing threats of terror attacks against US movie theatres, but following widespread criticism of the decision, including from Obama, the movie opened this week.

The Interview opened this week (Picture: Reuters)

North Korea"s defence commission also blamed Washington for intermittent outages of its websites this past week, which happened after the US had promised to respond to the Sony hack.

The US has so far declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.