North Korea demands South send back restaurant workers

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday reiterated its demands for South Korea to send back 12 North Korean restaurant workers who came to the South in 2016, saying such a move would demonstrate Seoul’s willingness to improve relations.

The statement by North Korea’s Red Cross came a week after Seoul said it would look more closely into the circumstances surrounding the women’s arrival following a media report that suggested some of them might have been brought to the South against their will.

Earlier in the week, North Korea canceled a high-level meeting with the South over U.S.-South Korean military exercises and threatened to call off a planned summit between its leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Donald Trump.

The cancellation cooled what had been an unusual flurry of diplomatic moves from Pyongyang following a provocative year of nuclear and missile tests.

Kim met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a historic summit on April 27 where they issued a vague vow for the “complete denuclearization” of their peninsula and pledged permanent peace. More substantial discussions over the North’s nuclear weapons are expected between Kim and Trump in a meeting planned for June 12 in Singapore.

The North’s Red Cross accused South Korean officials of evading responsibility and betraying the spirit of last month’s inter-Korean summit.

Seoul had previously said it sufficiently confirmed the women’s free will in escaping from the North and resettling in the South. North Korea had been accusing South Korea of abducting the women, who were working in China.

Television network JTBC aired an interview this month of a man it said was the manager of a restaurant in China where the women had been working. The man, who’s now also in South Korea, said he carried out the escape under plans arranged by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and that the women were brought along without knowledge of where they were going.

Ahn Young-joon The Associated Press A North Korean defector tears a paper with a portrait of Kim Jong Un during a rally Saturday against the possible repatriation of North Korean restaurant workers to North Korea, in front of the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea.