Japan asked the U.N. Human Rights Commission on Wednesday to reopen an investigation into eight Japanese abducted to North Korea whom Pyongyang says later died there.
The government filed the case with the commission's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, according to diplomatic sources.
Relatives of the abductees filed a similar request with the panel in April 2001, but North Korea was still denying at that point it had abducted any Japanese and refused to cooperate.
In a stunning about-face in September, however, Pyongyang admitted that 13 Japanese nationals were either abducted or lured to North Korea over a seven-year period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It claimed eight of them have died.