“I just hope I have the chance to see her, and hold in my arms once before I die.”But yesterday Kayoko learnt her daughter was dead. “Keiko must be so sorry she ignored my advice to come straight home from England,” her mother, Kayoko Arimoto, said then. In Keiko’s case this was confirmed when her parents received a smuggled photograph of a baby girl she had had in North Korea by her husband, another abducted Japanese.Then, this year, the former wife of a Japanese Red Army terrorist testified in court that she had helped to abduct Keiko in Copenhagen. The Japanese authorities compiled a list of 11 people who they believed had been spirited to Pyongyang. She sent her parents a postcard from Copenhagen in October 1983, and was not heard of again.Over the years, as the families grieved, there were suspicions that the sinister regime in North Korea was to blame. Other Japanese disappeared after studying in Europe, including Keiko Arimoto, who went travelling in Europe after an English course in London.
After years of angry denials, North Korea admitted yesterday that its intelligence services had kidnapped 11 Japanese since the 1970s.
Among those who disappeared from Japan’s lonely northern coast was Megumi Yokota, 13, a schoolgirl on her way home from badminton practice. Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese assistant cameraman, was arrested in Afghanistan in December.. All four have appealed.* The pan-Arab satellite television station al-Jazeera says one of its employees is being detained with al-Qa’ida suspects at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba. Mr Saeed was sentenced to death and the others received life sentences. Four men, including British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, were convicted of the murder in July. The official refused to name the accused, but said he was not among the five, including Mr bin al-Shibh, transferred to US custody and flown out of Pakistan.Mr Pearl, 38, was kidnapped in Karachi last January while investigating links between Pakistani extremists and the alleged British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid His decapitated body was foundlater. There, he identified the man as one of three Arabs who killed Mr Pearl.
After his arrestlast week, Mr Karim was taken to a house where 10 al-Qa’ida suspects were held. A Yemeni militant suspected of involvement in the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was among the men seized with the self-confessed 11 September plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh, officials said yesterday.
A senior Pakistani police official told reporters that the man was identified by Fazal Karim, one of three Pakistanis held in connection with Mr Pearl’s death but not yet charged. “There’ll be a massacre every day,” said Maher Srour, 35, who saw members of the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces militia shoot his infant sister during the massacre, in which his father and several siblings were also killed.. We can’t be certain that the next Palestinian leadership will be any more convenient for us, but if the reforms go ahead it should be possible to go again to negotiations.”* Two decades after Israel’s Lebanese allies tried to slaughter them in Beirut refugee camps, survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacres say the world has given Ariel Sharon a licence to kill by forgetting their ordeal.They say the Israeli Prime Minister – the architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which the massacres took place – learnt that Palestinians can be killed with impunity.
