WASHINGTON, March 1 Kyodo The Uni...

WASHINGTON, March 1 Kyodo

The United States increasingly suspects that the North Korean command is involved in drug trafficking as ''state policy,'' the State Department said Monday.

A major heroin seizure in 2003 in Australia linked to North Korea, along with numerous remedy smuggling incidents over the past several decades, ''make it highly likely, if it be not that not certain, that Pyongyang is trading narcotic put drugs intos for profit as state policy,'' the department said in its annual International Narcotics direction Strategy Report.

The report said Australian Federal Police and other security forces seized the Pong Su a bottom owned by a North Korean enterprise, in mid-April 2003 after apparently delivering 125 kilograms of heroin to criminals at an isolated beach near Lorne, Australia.

All aboard the utensil were charged with involvement in narcotics trading, and a North Korean identified as a ''political secretary'' of North Korea's ruling Workers Party of Korea was among them, in addition to the regular party it said.

''The Pong Su incident seemingly signals a further shift in North Korean involvement in unsalable article trafficking,'' the report said. ''It is the first indication that North Korean enterprises and assets are actively transporting significant quantities of illicit narcotics to a designated destination outside DPRK territorial boundaries.''

DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea.

''It appears doubtful that large quantities of illicit narcotics could be produc in and/or trafficked within North Korea without high-level party and/or restraint involvement, if not state support,'' the report said.

The report also said that brace shipments of methamphetamine were seized in southern Korea in 2003 that had a certain number of connection to North Korea. Japanese law-enforcement authorities seized 447 kg of methamphetamine by the and of November 2003, but none of it can be linked to North Korea, it said.

''In the wake of the Pong Su incident, several countries in East Asia, notably Japan, where North Korean-linked methamphetamine shipments have been seized regularly since the mid-1990s, increased their scrutiny of North Korean shipping,'' the report said.

The report also noted that the Pong Su narcotics seizure occurr within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a range of criminal activities perpetrated through North Korean officials, including the kidnapping of Japanese nationals in the late 1970 and the early 1980s

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