North Korean waitresses tricked into going to South, says Pyongyang

PYONGYANG — North Korea stepped up its calls on Tuesday (May 03) for South Korea to return 12 waitresses whom Pyongyang said were abducted from a restaurant in China.

North Korea said the women were tricked into thinking they were being transferred to work at another restaurant in Malaysia. However, Seoul said the waitresses willingly defected to the South.

On April 8, South Korean authorities announced the arrival of 13 North Koreans in the South — the 12 waitresses and their manager. Since then, North Korean authorities have issued repeated statements calling on Seoul to return the waitresses or let their parents go to Seoul to meet them.

Colleagues of the waitresses said their manager told them they were moving to Malaysia to work in a restaurant there. They also said that the waitresses who got on a bus from their restaurant to go on the journey thought Malaysia was their final destination.

One of the colleagues of the 12 waitresses, Choe Rye Yong, said that as they were being organised to leave, she overheard her manager refer to a man who was with him at the time as a “team leader” from the South Korean National Intelligence Service.

That made her warn her colleagues, who had not yet gotten on the bus, to stay away.

The waitresses were all working at a restaurant called the Azalea Friendship Restaurant in Ningbo, China.

They said they had previously worked at another North Korean-run restaurant in Yanji, in the north-east of China. AP