KUALA LUMPUR : The families of four Malaysian women missing since 1978 will seek help from North Korea after US army deserter Charles Jenkins said he had seen one of them there, a Malaysian politician said.
Michael Chong said he was assisting the families after Jenkins, who spent 40 years in North Korea, told Japanese reporter Hideki Akiyama that he met Malaysian woman Ying Ying Tai several times in Pyongyang some 25 years ago.
"I met Akiyama this morning and I hope to meet our minister of foreign affairs on Monday. I'm sure North Korea will deny it but we will have to go through diplomatic channels if there is concrete proof," Chong told AFP.
Chong, a member of the Malaysian Chinese Association party that is a junior partner in the ruling coalition, said Akiyama was returning to Japan to obtain more information and proof from Jenkins, who identified Tai by a distinctive mole near her left eye.
The other three women who went missing with Tai are Yap Mei Leng, Si Toh Tai Thim and Margaret Ong Guat Choo, who were all aged between 19 and 22 years at the time of their disappearance.
The four Malaysians, together with a Singaporean women, were last seen in 1978 boarding a cargo ship off Singaporean waters accompanied by three men.
Chong said the women's families had given them up for dead.
"Now, their brothers and sisters hope they may be found before their parents, who are quite old, pass away," Chong said.
Jenkins, who currently lives in Japan with his family, wrote a book detailing his ordeal in North Korea and other memories of his time there such as meeting his Japanese wife who was abducted by agents of the Stalinist regime.
He said that North Korea had kidnapped citizens from Romania, Thailand and other countries.
"I've seen many people but I don't have proof of all the countries they are from," Jenkins said in October when his book was launched.
The women apparently joined a number of Japanese kidnapped during the Cold War to train spies in their language and culture.
Jenkins walked across the snowy Cold War frontier dividing North and South Korea in 1965 when he was a 24-year-old sergeant disgruntled with army life and spooked by the fear of being sent to fight in Vietnam.
He was allowed to leave the Stalinist state last year to settle in Japan's small northern island of Sado, where his wife Soga grew up.
- AFP /ct