Police to add Soga, mother to abduction list

Japan Policy & Politics, Oct 14, 2002

TOKYO, Oct. 7 Kyodo

The National Police Agency (NPA) is preparing to add Hitomi Soga and her mother, Miyoshi, who disappeared together from Niigata's Sadogashima Island in 1978, to its list of Japanese nationals abducted to North Korea, police sources said Monday.

The additions, likely to be formalized this week, would bring the number of abductions to North Korea officially recognized by Japanese authorities to 13 individuals in nine cases.

The NPA is also considering including in the list Toru Ishioka and Kaoru Matsuki, two Japanese men said to have been lured to North Korea from Europe in 1980 when they were aged 22 and 26, respectively, the sources said.

The Niigata prefectural police on Saturday inspected various locations on Sadogashima Island in Niigata Prefecture in relation to accounts given by Hitomi Soga, 43, of the abduction incident to a recent Japanese government fact-finding mission to Pyongyang.

The NPA and Niigata police determined there are no disparities between her accounts and the sites mentioned therein, according to the sources.

Pyongyang has admitted that some circles within the government abducted or lured 13 Japanese to North Korea, that eight of them have died and five are alive and living in the North Korean capital. But Miyoshi Soga, who was 46 when she went missing, was not among the 13.

North Korea told the mission that a local contractor handed only Hitomi over to North Korean agents, but Japanese police believe there was no such contractor and suspect both Miyoshi and Hitomi were abducted by the agents themselves, the sources said.

Hitomi Soga, who has married an American in North Korea and has two children, told the Japanese mission that she has not seen her mother since the abduction.

She said a group of three men assaulted her and her mother as they were walking along a road by a house with a large tree nearby on their way home from grocery shopping, according to the mission's transcript of the interview with Soga.

The men dragged them to the base of the tree, gagged them and stuffed them into separate sacks, she said. The woman said she was put on a small boat on a river and then transferred to a larger ship out at sea, the transcript says.

The police also reviewed records of witness reports of suspicious ships in nearby waters around the time of the two women's disappearance, the sources said.

Ishioka, who is from Sapporo, and Matsuki, hailing from Kumamoto, were among a list of Japanese who Pyongyang said have died in North Korea.

The Metropolitan Police Department sent investigators to Europe last month to probe the cases of the two men, suspected of having been lured to the North by the wives of two Red Army Faction members who took part in the hijacking of a Japan Airlines plane to North Korea in 1970.

Ishioka married Keiko Arimoto, who disappeared from Europe in 1983 at age 23, and the pair had a daughter, but the three died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1988, according to accounts given by North Korea. Matsuki reportedly died in a traffic accident in 1996.