Police obtained an arrest warrant Tuesday for a Japanese woman who is married to one of nine radicals who hijacked a plane to North Korea in 1970, for allegedly violating the Japanese passport law, investigative sources said.
Sakiko Wakabayashi, 49, who lives in North Korea, is suspected of going there in 1984 without government approval, when visits to the country were still restricted.
The Metropolitan Police Department also suspects that she was involved in the abduction of some of the Japanese nationals that North Korea has admitted kidnapping in the 1970s and 1980s.
The National Police Agency will soon put her on the international wanted list through Interpol, according to the sources.
MPD investigators meanwhile searched her family's house and other locations in Japan on Tuesday.
The sources said Wakabayashi is also suspected of writing a false Japanese address in a passport renewal application in 1986 at the Japanese Consulate in Geneva.
Wakabayashi is the wife of Moriaki Wakabayashi, 57, one of the Red Army Faction members who hijacked a Japan Airlines plane with 138 people aboard to Pyongyang in March 1970.