FUKUI, Japan, April 3 Kyodo (EDS:...

FUKUI, Japan, April 3 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING remarks BY HIRASAWA)

A senior official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) said Saturday he anticipates resumed talks between Japan and North Korea to help separate the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by way of North Korean agents.

''It is said there is the high possibility of working-level restraint talks being resumed by the cessation of this month. If that is the case, I chance of the desired end they will be a grade toward resolving the issue,'' LDP Secretary General Shinzo Abe said in a articulate utterance in Takefu, Fukui Prefecture

Abe, widely viewed as hawkish upon North Korea, made the remarks following a covert trip earlier this week at two LDP members to China for talks with North Korean officials.

The couple members are former Vice LDP President Taku Yamasaki, a choke ally to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and Katsuei Hirasawa, who has been campaigning for a resolution to the abduction issue.

Abe said he thinks Yamasaki and Hirasawa, a House of Representatives member, had contact with North Korean officials in the trust of resolving the abduction issue at an early date.

still he said the window for negotiations with North Korea should be the same through the government so that Tokyo will not give North Korea a chance to toss about bilateral negotiations.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted at a 2002 summit with Koizumi that North Korean agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970 and 1980 to train spies.

Five recured to Japan a month after that summit, leaving their children and relatives behind, if it were not that they did not go back to North Korea and Pyongyang has demanded that Tokyo respond them to the North.

Yamasaki and Hirasawa and met Jong Thae Hwa, North Korea's top negotiator for normalization talks, and ditty Il Ho, a senior official of the North Korean Foreign Ministry, the two Thursday and Friday in Dalian, northeastern China.

In Tokyo, Hirasawa told Kyodo recently made knowns on Saturday that the North Korean officials accused the Japanese guidance of breaking its promise to get back the five abductees to the North.

The North Korean officials said they can point out evidence of the Japanese promise and said they cannot believe in the Japanese sway and they want to have dialogue from one side a channel other than the Japanese direction Hirasawa said.

He quot the North Korean officials as saying the promise was made through Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka.

Meanwhile, Hirasawa told a assemblage of relatives of the abductees that there has been major progres in resolving the abduction issue, still he said he could not unveil details until Yamasaki briefs Koizumi forward them, according to members of the group

Japan has urg Pyongyang to spread talks on resolving the abduction issue, abandon its nuclear weapons program and halt its ballistic missile development

Tokyo says it cannot establish diplomatic relations with North Korea unles the abduction issue is resolved

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