As Japanese investigators continue their raids into several offices of the pro-North Korea organization in Tokyo for “financial irregularities,” culminating this week with the arrest of a former senior official, North Korea responded by accusing Japan of launching a politically motivated probe.
The arrested former official belonged to the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongnyeon. He was nabbed on charges of creating tax reports without a license.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency denounced the raids as an "unpardonable politically motivated crackdown," Yonhap News reported Saturday.
The Minju Chosun, a paper run by the North's Cabinet, also said Tokyo has conducted the raids to pressure Pyongyang over the issue of Japanese abductees.
Relations between the two countries have gone sour as North Korea continues to deny Japan's claim that Pyongyang has yet to return all of the Japanese nationals its agents had kidnapped in the past decades.
Chongnyeon was founded in 1955 and has since acted on behalf of North Korea in Japan. The two nations have yet to establish diplomatic relations.