Mother and ‘abducted’ son meet in Korean reunions

A SOUTH Korean man allegedly abducted by the North met his mother for the first time in more than 25 years yesterday, a highly anticipated reunion that could not only shed light on his ordeal but help resolve a Japanese mystery.

Kim Young-nam and his 78-year-old mother cried and hugged each other at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, amid other reunions of Koreans divided between the North and South.

“I am very happy to see you are so healthy,” Mr Kim, 45, told his mother, Choi Gye-wol, who sat in a wheelchair, according to television footage.

“Stop crying, why do you cry on such a happy day?”

She responded, saying: “You look so much like how you were.”

Mr Kim was 16 when he disappeared from a beach on South Korea’s south-west coast in 1978.

His family thought he had drowned but learned later from the South Korean government that he was believed to have been abducted by North Korean agents and forced to live there.

Now 45, Kim is among nearly 500 South Korean civilians believed to have been kidnapped by the communist state and still held there.

North Korea claims they voluntarily defected.

Thousands of relatives divided by the heavily fortified inter-Korean border have been allowed to hold brief reunions since 2000, when the two Koreas held the first and only summit of their leaders and embarked on historic reconciliation efforts.

The North unexpectedly announced earlier this month it had found Mr Kim and would allow him to meet South Korean relatives. Pyongyang did not say how Mr Kim got to the North.

The reunion with his mother, proposed by North Korea, is drawing intense attention in South Korea and Japan because it could shed light on whether a Japanese abductee whom Mr Kim is believed to have married is dead, as claimed by the North.