Japan Sends Team to North Korea to Confirm Abductees’ Identities

A Japanese fact-finding team seeking to confirm the identities of a dozen people abducted by North Korea decades ago arrived in Pyongyang on Saturday for a four-day visit.

The government team flew to the North Korean capital from Beijing, where the group had landed the day before, Foreign Ministry official Kentaro Hatakeyama said.

The team is expected to conduct DNA tests to confirm the abductees’ identities and interview the only four still alive to determine whether they wish to return to Japan. The group also is likely to request a meeting with those in Pyongyang who could provide details about the abductees.

Reversing decades of denial, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted in a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi this month that agents conducted repeated covert kidnap- pings of Japanese. Pyongyang said it used the abductees to train spies in Japan’s language and culture.

Kim’s confession was welcomed as a sign of unusual openness from the isolated Communist nation, but it also generated outrage in Japan.

North Korea has said that of the 12 Japanese abducted in the 1970s and ‘80s, eight are confirmed dead.

Families of the abductees have demanded that Pyongyang provide more information and proof that the people it claims died were actually their kin. The families of those said to be alive in the North have refused a government proposal to visit them there, saying the abductees should instead be returned to Japan within a month.

Before leaving Tokyo, the team met with relatives of the abductees to collect hair samples, photos and other information that might help confirm identities.