North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has expressed interest in seeing progress on the long-standing issue of 10 Japanese that Tokyo believes were abducted by Pyongyang agents in the 1970s and 1980s, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.
Later in the day, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, with whom the official was traveling, said she emphasized to Kim the importance of resolving the issue.
Albright made the statement during a news conference in Seoul after meeting South Korean Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Lee Joung Binn and Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono in which she briefed the two on the results of her historic trip to North Korea.
"I made it very clear . . . the importance of the (abduction) issue not only to Japan but to us," she said. "I did raise it a number of times," she said, referring to her talks Monday and Tuesday with Kim in Pyongyang.