The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Tuesday said the United States has returned a diplomatic package seized from one of their delegations at JFK airport in New York and apologized.

The Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman of the DPRK Foreign Ministry as saying that the U.S. Department of State has made an official apology to the DPRK on behalf of the U.S. government.

The spokesman said the United States acknowledged that its security officials made a mistake and expressed its hope that the DPRK would understand that "the mistake was due to the security officials being oversensitive amid the deteriorating security situation in the United States."

The spokesman called on the United States to learn a lesson from the incident and "never again commit such an act of infringing the sovereignty of other countries, in flagrant violation of the universally recognized international norms and regulations."

The U.S. State Department did not respond to Xinhua's request for comment.