North Korea to update on missing Japanese -report
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-08-10 14:20

North Korea will provide an interim report this week on the fate of 10 missing Japanese whom Tokyo believes were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s, Kyodo news agency said on Tuesday.

Officials of Japan and North Korea are set to meet in Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday for talks on the 10 abducted Japanese.

The abduction issue is the main stumbling block to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang, along with the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs, which are the subject of separate multilateral talks.

North Korean Foreign Ministry official Song Il Ho told reporters in Beijing the investigation into the missing 10 was still going on, indicating he would provide an interim report on the progress at this week's talks, Kyodo said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il agreed at a Pyongyang summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in May to reinvestigate the fate of the 10 Japanese.

North Korea has previously said eight of the 10 were dead.

Political analysts have said a failure to produce any survivors would inflame Japanese public opinion.

North Korea's Kim said in a September 2002 summit with Koizumi that Pyongyang's agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies for the North.

North Korea said eight of them -- whose names are included in the 10 cases Tokyo wants reopened -- had died of illness, suicide or accident.

The other five returned to Japan in October 2002 and were reunited with their North Korean-born children this year.

Japan, which ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony between 1910 and 1945, established diplomatic ties with South Korea in 1965 but has never had relations with the North.

The two Asian neighbors last held normalization talks in October 2002 but the process was derailed by the dispute over the abductees and the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear programs.

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