North Korea demands South return restaurant workers

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA» North Korea on Saturday reiterated its demands for South Korea to send back 12 North Korean restaurant workers who came to the South in 2016, saying such a move would demonstrate Seoul’s willingness to improve relations.

The statement by North Korea’s Red Cross came a week after Seoul said it would look more closely into the circumstances surrounding the women’s arrival after a media report that suggested some of them might have been brought to the South against their will.

Earlier in the week, North Korea canceled a high-level meeting with the South over U.s.-south Korean military exercises and threatened to call off a planned summit between its leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Donald Trump.

The cancellation cooled what had been an unusual flurry of diplomatic moves from Pyongyang after a provocative year of nuclear and missile tests.

Kim met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a historic summit April 27 in which they issued a vague vow for the “complete denuclearization” of their peninsula and pledged permanent peace. More substantial discussions over the North’s nuclear weapons are expected between Kim and Trump in a meeting planned for June 12 in Singapore.

The North’s Red Cross accused South Korean officials of evading responsibility and betraying the spirit of last month’s inter-korean summit.

It said Seoul should “severely punish those involved in the case, send our women citizens to their families without delay and thus show the will to improve the North-south ties.”