N Korea Accuses S. of Kidnapping Citizens
Local Editor
North Korea said Seoul "lured" and "kidnapped" 13 of its citizens who worked in a state-run restaurant in China and demanded their repatriation.
A spokesman for North Korea's Red Cross Society said on Tuesday that intelligence agents from the neighboring South abducted the North Korean nationals by using "all sorts of appeasement, deception and gimmicks."
"Unless they apologize for the hideous abduction and send those abductees back, they will face unimaginable serious consequences and severe punishment," the North's official Korean Central News Agency quoted the spokesman as saying.
Earlier last week, South Korea claimed that 13 North Koreans who worked for an overseas restaurant run by the North defected to the South. Officials initially did not give information about the location the 13 had worked and how they went to Seoul.
However, reports said that the 13 North Korean nationals worked in a restaurant in China's southeastern port city of Ningbo and that they decided to defect after watching South Korean televisions and distrusting North Korea's propaganda.
They had reportedly left China on April 6 and arrived in Seoul a day later. For its part, China said the North Koreans left its border with valid passports.
In this regard, some 29,000 people have fled from the North since the Koreas were divided at a war in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Pyongyang condemned Seoul and Washington for pushing UN sanctions against the North's nuclear and missile programs and also reacted severely to the joint annual military drills staged by the US and the South.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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