US President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated that imposing an additional tariff on China for allegedly mishandling the Coronavirus outbreak is “certainly an option”.

Trump was responding to a question about his remarks a day earlier in which he had indicated at imposing tariff on China as a punishment for the spread of Coronavirus. “It’s certainly an option. It”s certainly an option,” Trump said but did not give a timeline for this.

“We’re going to see what happens. A lot of things are happening with respect to China. We’re not happy, obviously, with what happened. This is a bad situation all over the world, 182 countries. But we’ll be having a lot to say about that,” he said in response to a question.

In an interview to Buck Sexton of The Buck Sexton Show, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of being non- transparent on the issue of coronavirus.

“They’ve claimed that they have been transparent, but of course, at least as of a day or two ago, we still didn’t actually have a sample of the virus. We were still working to try to understand what the scope of the risk was,” he said.

Pompeo said China claimed it didn’t know where the Coronavirus came from, but those inside China, who tried to talk about the virus, were denied access.

They were told “don’t talk about that, stop it” and discussions were banned early on, he added.

“That’s not the way partners work, reliable partners work. Reliable partners share. They open up, especially when there’s trouble. They go overboard to make sure everybody can understand how it came to be. That’s all we’ve asked for,” the secretary of state said.

“We hope that the Chinese Communist Party will see their way clear to allow the world to understand how the heck this virus got out of Wuhan, China, and spread all across the world,” he said.

“We need responsibility and accountability for this outbreak,” Pompeo said.

He said it was really important to understand what happened in China during the virus outbreak to make sure something like this does not happen again.

“There are multiple labs inside of China and our understanding of what takes place there is pretty limited, and there have been examples of leaks from those labs before,” Pompeo said.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump had threatened China with fresh tariffs as he stepped up his attacks on Beijing over the COVID-19 crisis, saying he had seen evidence linking a Wuhan lab to the contagion, which has infected at least 3.2 million people so far.

Chinese city of Wuhan remained the epicentre of COVID-19 for a long time and novel Coronavirus is believed to have originated late last year in its wet market that sold wild animals for human consumption, but speculation has swirled about a top-secret lab in the ground-zero city.

Asked if he had seen anything giving him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, Trump replied, “Yes, I have.”

US President is increasingly making Beijing’s handling of the outbreak a major issue for his November re-election campaign.

When asked about reports that he could cancel US debt obligations to China, Trump said he could “do it differently” and act in “probably a little bit more of a forthright manner.”

“I could do the same thing but even for more money, just putting on tariffs,” he said.

Despite a truce in the long-running trade war between Washington and Beijing reached in January, tariffs are already in place on two-thirds of trade between the economic powers.

Trump had earlier this week said his administration is carrying out a “very serious” investigation against China, indicating that his administration is looking at a bigger compensation from Beijing than the $140 billion being sought by Germany over the Coronavirus pandemic.

Leaders of the US, the UK and Germany increasingly believe that the unfortunate deaths of so many people and destruction of the global economy could have been avoided, if China had shown transparency and shared the information about the virus in its early phases.

Many countries have started talking about claiming compensation from China.

He further said that there are “a lot of ways” one can hold China accountable for the spread of the virus. “We’re doing very serious investigations, as you probably know. We are not happy with China,” he said.

Last week, President Donald Trump had said that his country was “attacked”.

“We were attacked. This was an attack. This wasn’t just the flu by the way. Nobody has ever seen anything like this, 1917 was the last time,” Trump told reporters at his daily White House news conference.

Trump has been constantly blaming China and the World Health Organisation for being responsible for the pandemic.

Meanwhile, China has strongly opposed to any “arbitrary” probe into the origin of Coronavirus pandemic that is based on the presumption of its guilt, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said.

“This is an arbitrary investigation based on the presumption of guilt. That is what we firmly oppose,” Efe news reported on Thursday citing Le as saying.

“We support professional exchanges between scientists. What we oppose, however, is unfounded charges against China. One should not accuse China first and then run so-called international investigations just to make up the evidence.”

(With agency inputs)