Planned security talks with Pyongyang may not be held this month due to the North's refusal to drop its demand for the return of five Japanese it abducted in 1978 and recently allowed to go home, Katsunari Suzuki, Japan's ambassador in charge of normalization talks with North Korea, said Wednesday.
"We are conducting preparations along those lines, but we cannot judge the outcome," Suzuki told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, referring to the agreement reached during normalization talks held in Kuala Lumpur last month to hold the security dialogue in November.
At the same session Wednesday, an opposition lawmaker lashed out at ruling bloc executives over their refusal to let a North Korean defector, identified earlier as a former agent, testify before the committee about the North's abductions and its nuclear weapons and missile programs, which Japan had expected to take up in the security talks.
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