Japan coast guard finds bodies in washed up boat

EIGHT bodies were found in a small wooden boat that washed up on a beach in the Sea of Japan yesterday.

The bodies had been partly reduced to skeletons, the Japan Coast Guard said.

It was working to establish the nationalities of the bodies.

The boat washed up on a beach 70km north of a marina where eight other men from North Korea were found by police last week.

Police said they appeared to be fishermen whose boat, found nearby, had run into trouble.

The badly decomposed bodies of two men were also found on the western shore of the Sea of Japan island of Sado at the weekend.

Although the nationalities of those men had not been established yet, cigarettes and life jackets with Korean lettering on them had been found nearby, the coast guard’s Sado station said.

The incidents come at a time of rising tension over North Korea’s nuclear arms and missile programmes, after US President Donald Trump had redesignated the nation a sponsor of terrorism, allowing further sanctions by the US.

Experts said North Korea’s food shortages could be behind what was potentially a series of strife involving North Korean ships.

“North Korea pushes so hard for its people to gather more fish so they can make up their food shortages,” Seo Yu-suk, research manager of the North Korean Studies Institution in Seoul, said. – Reuters