North Korea proposes having 13 defectors to south meet with relatives

North Korea proposed Thursday to send family members to meet with 13 North Korean restaurant workers who arrived in South Korea this month in what was described by the South as a rare group defection.

The South immediately dismissed the offer as propaganda and reiterated that the North Koreans had defected of their own free will.

North Korea, which has demanded their return, claims that the South kidnapped the workers – 12 waitresses and a male manager – from a restaurant run by the North Korean government in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

On Thursday, the North’s Red Cross Society suggested that the South allow the workers to meet with relatives at Panmunjom, a village on the border between the two Koreas that serves as a contact point.

“If necessary, we are willing to send family members to Seoul,” the South Korean capital, the North said in a statement carried by its official Korean Central News Agency.

The 13 North Koreans are undergoing a government debriefing and resettlement programme that could take several months, during which they are not permitted to speak to journalists. They decided to defect to the South after learning about the life there through South Korean television dramas and movies they watched in China, South Korean officials said.

Many other details of their trip remain unknown. Seven North Korean waitresses at the restaurant returned to the North. They told a CNN reporter in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, that the 12 female workers had been deceived by the male manager, who they said held their passports and conspired with a South Korean businessman and authorities in the South to take them to Seoul.

The manager told the workers that they were being relocated to another restaurant in southeast Asia, one of the women told CNN in the interview, broadcast Thursday. North Korea runs restaurants in China and elsewhere abroad to earn badly needed foreign currency. – New York Times service