An alleged US army defector to North Korea yesterday spent his first full day outside the Stalinist state in decades at a luxury Jakarta hotel following his tearful reunion with his Japanese wife.
Charles Robert Jenkins, 64, and wife Hitomi Soga, 45, were reunited on Friday at Sukarno-Hatta Airport after Jenkins and their daughters, Mika, 21, and Belinda, 18, arrived on a chartered flight from Pyongyang.
"They will stay by themselves this morning in their suite, having breakfast together," Japanese embassy spokesman Toshihide Kawa-saki said.
PHOTO: AFP
He said no activities were scheduled for the family and he expected them to stay in their two-bedroom suite all day.
Jenkins, who held the rank of sergeant in the US Army, is believed to be making his first trip outside North Korea since he disappeared near the border with South Korea in 1965.
Soga was kidnapped from the Japanese island of Sado in 1978 while on a shopping trip and taken to North Korea to teach its spies Japanese language and customs. She married Jenkins in 1980, apparently when he was teaching her English.
His wife was allowed to leave for Japan along with four other kidnap victims in October 2002 following a landmark summit between Japan and North Korea. The daughters stayed behind in North Korea.
Jenkins and Soga looked "fine and happy," according to Kyoko Nakayama, special adviser to the Japanese cabinet office who met them yesterday morning, Kawasaki said.
He had no further details. "We are trying to give them privacy as much as possible," Kawasaki said.
When reporters tried to reach the family by telephone a hotel operator said the names Jenkins, Soga and Hitomi were "not registered in our system."
Japanese officials said three North Koreans accompanied Jenkins and his daughters to Jakarta.
"This matter is not an issue between states. It will be left up to the will of the family," one of the North Korean officials told reporters at the hotel.
It remains unclear how long the Jenkins family will remain in Indonesia.
The third-country meeting, paid for by Japan, avoids the risk of the US prosecuting him. Indonesia does not have an extradition treaty with the US, while Japan would have a treaty obligation to hand him over to the US.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on Friday he will try to have Soga and her family live together in Japan.
"I want to see Japan and the United States find a mutually desirable solution based on their relationship of firm mutual trust," he said.
North Korea also appeared ready to let Jenkins and his family live together in Japan, the Jiji Press quoted a senior Japanese foreign ministry official as saying.
But Washington considers Jenkins a deserter, saying he left four notes stating his intention to defect. His family in the US say they believe he was captured and brainwashed.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the
POINTING FINGERS: The two countries have accused each other of firing first, with Bangkok accusing Phnom Penh of targeting civilian infrastructure, including a hospital Thai acting Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai yesterday warned that cross-border clashes with Cambodia that have uprooted more than 130,000 people “could develop into war,” as the countries traded deadly strikes for a second day. A long-running border dispute erupted into intense fighting with jets, artillery, tanks and ground troops on Thursday, and the UN Security Council was set to hold an emergency meeting on the crisis yesterday. A steady thump of artillery strikes could be heard from the Cambodian side of the border, where the province of Oddar Meanchey reported that one civilian — a 70-year-old man — had been killed and