Police arrested the son of North Korea’s unofficial ambassador to Japan on Tuesday for allegedly smuggling expensive mushrooms into the country, in the latest incident underlining the increasing tensions between Tokyo and Pyongyang.
The two countries had been working together last year to resolve the decades-old case of by North Korea. But as Pyongyang has dallied on issuing a report on the whereabouts of the missing Japanese, Tokyo has extended bilateral sanctions and conducted several police raids against North Korean operations in Japan.
The arrest on Tuesday of Ho Jong Do, the son of Ho Jong Man, leader of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, also known as “Chosen Soren” in Japanese, was the latest such raid.
Hong Jong Do was among three people arrested on charges of smuggling 1,800 kilograms, or about 4,000 pounds, of prized matsutake mushrooms into Japan in September 2010, contravening Japanese sanctions imposed against North Korea in 2006 as punishment for its missile and nuclear tests. He is accused of shipping the mushrooms, with a declared customs value of about $38,000, into China and then importing them into Japan as Chinese-grown.
Police searched the offices of Korean Product Sales in Tokyo, where Hon Jong Do is president, a year ago and searched six Chosen Soren leaders’ houses in March. At the time, Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency called the raids “a despicable act of fanning antagonism” toward North Korea.
In the absence of diplomatic ties between Tokyo and Pyongyang, the Chosen Soren has functioned as North Korea’s de facto embassy in Japan and Ho Jong Man as its de facto ambassador.
An angry Ho Jong Man denounced the charges Tuesday.
“It’s complete nonsense and a plot. There’s not even a 0.1-millimeter violation of the law,” he told reporters outside his house. “This is the fault of the prime minister’s office for allowing the police to act irresponsibly and groundlessly. This will seriously affect Japan-North Korea relations.”
But Yoshihide Suga, the prime minister’s chief cabinet secretary, said that the investigation was based on law and evidence.
“There is no change in our position to strongly demand North Korea promptly carry out an investigation [on Japanese abductees] based on the Japan-North Korea agreement and quickly and honestly report its outcome to Japan,” Suga said at a news conference Tuesday.
Pyongyang agreed last year to open a new investigation into the whereabouts of a dozen Japanese nationals who were . Five abductees were returned in 2002, but North Korea said that the other 12 it admitted taking had all died.
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