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Tokyo police secure arrest warrants for two North Koreans

Japanese police yesterday obtained arrest warrants for two North Koreans suspected of kidnapping a Japanese citizen in 1980 -- one of a string of abductions that have long stoked tensions between Tokyo and Pyongyang.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department secured the arrest warrants for Shin Kwang-su, 76, and Kim Kil-uk, 76, a National Police Agency spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, citing agency protocol.

The two North Koreans are wanted for grabbing Tadaaki Hara, then 43, from a beach resort in southern Japan.

Hara was one of 13 Japanese citizens that North Korea in 2002 admitted to kidnapping to train spies in Japanese language and culture.

Pyongyang allowed five victims to return, saying the remaining eight -- including Hara -- were dead.

Tokyo, however, suspects that some of the missing victims may still be alive in North Korea, and has demanded that the Communist regime fully investigate the cases and hand over the kidnappers.

Shin, who lives in North Korea, is already wanted by Tokyo in the 1978 kidnapping of four other Japanese citizens. Japanese police believe that Shin and Kim conspired to abduct Hara by approaching him with a phony job offer.

Both suspects were arrested for spying in South Korea in 1985, Kyodo News agency reported. Kim was pardoned in 1990, and remained in South Korea; Shin was pardoned in 1999, and he returned to the North, Kyodo said.

Japanese TV Asahi network quoted Kim as denying his involvement in an interview behind a front door at what appeared to be his apartment on South Korea's Cheju Island.

"I was never involved in the case directly," a man who TV Asahi said was Kim declared in Japanese through an intercom. "I'm a victim, too."

The arrest warrants are part of a stepped-up campaign by Japan to solve the abductions, now that a series of sporadic talks with the North Koreans have yielded little or no progress.

Late last month, Japanese police raided the Osaka office of a chamber of commerce for North Korea on suspicion that its top officials were involved in Hara's kidnapping.

Japanese police already have asked the international policy agency Interpol to place Shin and another suspected agent, Choi Sung-chol, on an international wanted list for the separate abductions of two Japanese couples in 1978.

The National Police Agency plans to ask Interpol to post additional charges against Shin over the Hara case.
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