Kidnap victim's daughter pleads for visit

Kim Hye-gyong only discovered her heritage recently

The North Korea-Japan kidnap drama has taken a new twist with the 15-year-old daughter of one of the abductees making an emotional plea for her Japanese grandparents to visit her in Pyongyang.

The girl's mother, Megumi Yokota, was one of at least a dozen Japanese kidnapped by North Korea during the 1970s and 1980s.

Pyongyang says she committed suicide.

I cannot understand why my grandfather and other people do not come here

Kim Hye-gyong

Her daughter, Kim Hye-gyong, told a Japanese TV channel in Pyongyang on Friday that she did not think her Korean father would agree to her travelling to Japan.

Tokyo has told the five surviving abductees, who are visiting Japan with North Korea's approval, that they can remain indefinitely.

Japan is also pushing for their relatives to be allowed to leave North Korea and the countries are trying to negotiate a deal on their future.

Hospital suicide

Hye-gyong said she had not known that her mother was Japanese until the results of recent DNA tests were released.

The teenager's grandparents, in their late 60s, have been spearheading the campaign for the return of the kidnap victims.

Megumi Yokota when kidnapped in 1977 when she was 13 years old

In an interview with the Fuji TV network in the North Korean capital, Hye-gyong said: ''Because my father is Korean, I don't think I can go to Japan even if my mother was Japanese.

''I cannot understand why my grandfather and other people do not come here," she said.

The grandparents are reportedly reluctant to go to North Korea for fear of compromising their mission to learn exactly what happened.

Pyongyang has said Megumi Yokota, who was taken to North Korea in 1977 when she was 13, killed herself at a hospital in 1993 while suffering from depression.

North Korea had used the abductees to train spies who were to infiltrate South Korea posing as the kidnap victims.