Japan will make a "strong protest" to North Korea after the communist state fabricated all its evidence about the fate of Japanese whom it kidnapped during the Cold War, victims' relatives said yesterday.
Government officials met family members of the Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents amid growing public anger and calls for economic sanctions against Kim Jong-il's regime.
The officials said a government examination, initial findings of which were announced earlier this month, concluded that human remains which North Korea gave a visiting Japanese mission last month did not match the abduction victims.
"All the evidence was complete fabrication," one of the government officials said at the closed meeting, according to a relative.
"We cannot accept that," the official was quoted as saying. "The re-examination ordered by Secretary-General Kim lacked sincerity. We will make a strong protest."
The official said that Japan would deliver the results of its final study of the remains to the North Korean embassy in Beijing.
The evidence offered by North Korea included ashes said to be those of Megumi Yokota, who was 13 when she was whisked away in 1977 by North Korean agents who kidnapped Japanese people to train spies.
Japanese forensic experts have already said DNA tests proved the ashes are not those of Yokota, whose case has attracted great public sympathy.
North Korea has insisted the remains are genuine. Its official media said Thursday that Yokota's North Korean husband is requesting the return of the ashes in their original state.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, the Japanese government spokesman, on yesterday rejected any thought of returning the remains.
"We are not thinking about [that]," he told reporters.
The controversy has led lawmakers to demand economic sanctions against cash-strapped but heavily armed North Korea.
But Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has said such measures would be a last resort against the unpredictable neighbor, which fired a missile over Japan in 1998.
In 2002, Kim for the first time admitted that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese people and allowed five of them to come home, a move which led to aid from Japan and cleared the way for talks on normalizing relations.
But Japan believes at least 10 more abduction victims are alive and being kept under wraps, possibly because they know secrets about the isolated Stalinist state.
North Korea says eight of them are dead and the two others never entered its territory.
The kidnapping issue has dogged relations between North Korea and Japan as they take part in six-nation talks on curbing Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
The US, South Korea and China have all expressed caution about imposing sanctions against North Korea, fearing such a move would deal a blow to the nuclear talks.
A newspaper poll said Tuesday nearly two-thirds of Japanese want sanctions against North Korea over the kidnapping dispute but that the public understands why Koizumi is being cautious with Pyongyang.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS