KYODO NEWS - Jul 21, 2018 - 18:28 | All, Japan

North Korea provided little new information about abducted Japanese nationals when officials from Japan had contact with Pyongyang last month, a Japanese government source said Saturday.

When the officials made contact around the time of the U.S.-North Korea summit on June 12, North Korea repeated the results of its investigation into the Japanese abducted in the 1970s and 1980s that it previously provided to Japan following their talks in Stockholm in May 2014.

Tokyo had repeatedly asked the United States to raise the issue of abducted Japanese nationals at the summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but little is known about any response given by the reclusive state.

Japan officially lists 17 of its citizens as having been kidnapped by North Korean agents and suspects the North's involvement in many more disappearances of Japanese nationals. Of the 17, five were repatriated in 2002, but North Korea has claimed eight of them died and the other four never entered the country.

It is not known whether the North Korean officials provided any information on the remaining 12 people formally recognized by Tokyo as abduction victims during the contact last month.

According to the source, North Korea said no Japanese nationals had come to the country since two Japanese men, who were listed as entering North Korea in an "interim" report presented to Japan shortly after the Stockholm meeting, did.

The source said the two men are Minoru Tanaka and Tatsumitsu Kaneda, who used to work at the same restaurant in Kobe. Tanaka is one of the four North Korea previously said had never entered the country, and Kaneda is among those the Japanese government suspects were abducted.