KUALA LUMPUR : The families of four Malaysian women missing
since 1978 will seek help from North Korea after US army deserter
Charles Jenkins said he had seen one of them there, a Malaysian
politician said.
Michael Chong said he was assisting the families after Jenkins, who
spent 40 years in North Korea, told Japanese reporter Hideki
Akiyama that he met Malaysian woman Ying Ying Tai several times in
Pyongyang some 25 years ago.
"I met Akiyama this morning and I hope to meet our minister of
foreign affairs on Monday. I'm sure North Korea will deny it but we
will have to go through diplomatic channels if there is concrete
proof," Chong told AFP.
Chong, a member of the Malaysian Chinese Association party that is
a junior partner in the ruling coalition, said Akiyama was
returning to Japan to obtain more information and proof from
Jenkins, who identified Tai by a distinctive mole near her left
eye.
The other three women who went missing with Tai are Yap Mei Leng,
Si Toh Tai Thim and Margaret Ong Guat Choo, who were all aged
between 19 and 22 years at the time of their disappearance.
The four Malaysians, together with a Singaporean women, were last
seen in 1978 boarding a cargo ship off Singaporean waters
accompanied by three men.
Chong said the women's families had given them up for dead.
"Now, their brothers and sisters hope they may be found before
their parents, who are quite old, pass away," Chong said.
Jenkins, who currently lives in Japan with his family, wrote a book
detailing his ordeal in North Korea and other memories of his time
there such as meeting his Japanese wife who was abducted by agents
of the Stalinist regime.
He said that North Korea had kidnapped citizens from Romania,
Thailand and other countries.
"I've seen many people but I don't have proof of all the countries
they are from," Jenkins said in October when his book was
launched.
The women apparently joined a number of Japanese kidnapped during
the Cold War to train spies in their language and culture.
Jenkins walked across the snowy Cold War frontier dividing North
and South Korea in 1965 when he was a 24-year-old sergeant
disgruntled with army life and spooked by the fear of being sent to
fight in Vietnam.
He was allowed to leave the Stalinist state last year to settle in
Japan's small northern island of Sado, where his wife Soga grew
up.
- AFP /ct