North Korea has named an ambassador to Syria, the communist country’s official media said Monday, following U.S. allegations the two countries engaged in nuclear cooperation.

“Choe Su Hon was appointed as DPRK ambassador to Syria, according to a decree of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly,” the official Korean Central News Agency said in a one sentence dispatch from Pyongyang.

DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that Choe has been a deputy foreign minister since 1986, mainly responsible for diplomacy with the United Nations.

Israeli jets in September last year destroyed in Syria’s remote eastern desert what U.S. intelligence officials allege was a nearly completed plutonium-producing reactor that they say was built with North Korean assistance.

Syria has denied the site was a nuclear facility.

North Korea, which carried out an underground nuclear test blast in October 2006, has denied nuclear links with Syria.