Following China’s announcement last week,
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, who serves as the
government’s press secretary, denied that the two men had links with
Japanese intelligence. But the Tokyo-based Kyodo news agency reported
on Saturday that the two men had admitted that they had links with the
Public Security Intelligence Agency. Citing unnamed Chinese and Japanese
diplomats, Kyodo said the two men were on a mission to collect
intelligence about Chinese military facilities, as well as to spy on
Chinese military activities in the border regions between China and
North Korea. The news agency said that both men were civilians and did
not have diplomatic credentials. One of them is believed to be a
51-year-old who travels regularly to China. He was reportedly captured
in the vicinity of a military facility in China’s eastern coastal
province of Zhejiang. The other man was described by Kyoto as a
55-year-old North Korean defector to Japan; he was detained in the
northeast province of Liaoning (photo), near China’s border with North
Korea.
Kyoto said it contacted the Public
Security Intelligence Agency, but a spokesman said he was not in a
position to comment on the arrest of the two alleged spies. This is the
third instance of arrests of Japanese spies in China on espionage
charges since 2005. In the summer of that year, Beijing expelled two
Japanese nationals for allegedly stealing military secrets. Five years
later, four Japanese citizens were detained in Shijiazhuang, reportedly
for spying on a Chinese military base there. All were released within a
year of their capture.
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