NKorea to let Japan abductee relatives leave

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NKorea to let Japan abductee relatives leave


Saturday 22 May 2004

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has agreed to let all eight relatives of Japanese abducted decades ago leave the communist state, Japanese Prime Minister has said after a summit meeting.

Kim also pledged to work for a nuclear-arms-free Korean peninsula and a peaceful solution to a crisis over the North's nuclear programmes through multilateral talks, Junichiro Koizumi told a news conference on Saturday .

"We must normalise our abnormal ties," Koizumi said. "It is in the interests of both countries to change our hostile relation into a friendly one, our confrontational ties into cooperative ties. That is why I went to North Korea a second time."

The five abductees were ordinary young adults when they were snatched from their home towns a quarter of a century ago and taken to North Korea to help train spies.

They came back to Japan in October 2002, a month after Koizumi's first landmark summit with Kim, but had to leave behind their seven North Korean-born children, aged 16 to 22....cont'd

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0C9FA442-0BD7-4B4B-99AC-3FFE0B847045.htm