S. Korean Authorities' Unethical Crimes Should Be Called into Question: DPRK FM Spokesman

   Pyongyang, May 15 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK gave the following answer to a question raised by KCNA Sunday as regards the unsettled case of the allurement and abduction of a group of the DPRK's citizens by the south Korean authorities:
    As known, the south Korean authorities, engrossed with the smear campaign against the DPRK, let the gangsters of the Intelligence Service commit the heinous terrorist act of alluring and abducting the DPRK's women citizens in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province of China in broad daylight in early April to south Korea.
    This is a violent infringement upon the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK, unpardonable grave political provocation inciting confrontation and tension between the north and the south and unprecedented heinous crime mercilessly abusing the human rights of the DPRK's citizens.
    As soon as the case occurred, the DPRK strongly demanded the south Korean authorities unconditionally send back the abductees of the DPRK without delay and take a practical measure at once for helping the parents of the abductees go to Seoul and meet their daughters face to face while bitterly denouncing the brutal act of the south Korean puppet forces.
    Nevertheless, the south Korean authorities did not permit the elementary humanitarian demand of the parents but are talking about "voluntary defection from the north" while keeping the abductees in solitary cells and keeping them away from media.
    Their inhumane behavior is the unethical crime denying even the most elementary rights regulated in the World Declaration of Human Rights and relevant international conventions on human rights.
    The reality fully proves that the south Korean authorities are the chief criminals of human rights abuses and group of traitors without an equal in the world as they are keeping the DPRK's citizens in custody against their will, far from responding to the DPRK's magnanimous steps of good faith for improving the north-south relations published at the historic Seventh Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea.
    What matters is that the U.S. and the West are keeping mum about south Korea's institutional human rights abuses such as the heinous group allurement and abduction though they have groundlessly taken issue with other countries over their human rights whether they are true or false, while touting the "protection and promotion of human rights".
    The families of the abductees sent the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the president of the United Nations Human Rights Council the letters of indicting the south Korean authorities for their criminal act and demanding an immediate step.
    The UN and the international human rights organizations should bear in mind how they deal with this case will be a touchstone discerning the truth about "protection and promotion of human rights" touted by them, call into question the south Korean authorities' unethical crime and take a relevant step to send the abductees of the DPRK back to the folds of their family members as soon as possible. -