North Korea scraps probe into abducted Japanese

North Korea on Friday responded to fresh sanctions imposed by Tokyo, by scrapping an investigation into the North’s past abductions of Japanese citizens.

“The comprehensive investigation into all the Japanese … will be totally stopped,” the investigation committee said in a statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency.

The committee, set up under a bilateral agreement brokered in Stockholm in May, 2014, would also be dissolved, said the statement, which warned of “stronger counter-measures” to follow.

Under the Stockholm accord, North Korea undertook to reinvestigate all abductions of Japanese citizens in what appeared to be a significant breakthrough on an issue that has long hampered Tokyo’s relations with Pyongyang.

North Korea outraged Japan when it admitted in 2002 that it had kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies in Japanese language and customs.

Five of those abducted were allowed to return to Japan but Pyongyang has insisted, without producing solid evidence, that the eight others are dead.

The issue is a highly-charged one in Japan, where there are suspicions that perhaps dozens of other people were taken.

Pyongyang’s commitment to investigate was made after Tokyo eased a number of unilateral sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.

But there has been almost no progress since then, despite Tokyo’s efforts to pressure the North into pushing forward with the probe and presenting its findings.

Friday’s statement came after Japan announced new unilateral sanctions earlier this week in response to the North’s recent nuclear test and long-range rocket test.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration “reapplied the sanctions which had been lifted and even took additional sanctions,” the committee statement said.

“This is little short of the declaration of its own scrapping of the Stockholm agreement,” it added.