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SEOUL: After postponing an initiative that was certain to anger Pyongyang, Seoul on Friday stepped up efforts to secure the release of a South Korean detained in North Korea for almost three weeks.
The employee at the Seoul-funded industrial site of Kaesong has been held since March 30 for allegedly criticising the North's communist regime and trying to persuade a local woman worker to defect.
North Korea refuses to let Seoul representatives visit him at the estate just north of the border.
Cho Kun-Shik, president of the estate's developer Hyundai Asan, left for Kaesong on Friday where he plans to stay for a while to try to negotiate his employee's release, a company spokesman said.
"President Cho plans to meet North Korean authorities to plead with them strongly to release the man," the spokesman told AFP.
Cho is a former vice unification minister.
He took the helm of Hyundai Asan last August after a South Korean woman tourist was shot dead when she strayed into a military zone at Mount Kumgang, a Northern resort operated by Hyundai Asan.
Cho has visited the North six times between April 3 and 14 as part of efforts to secure the man's release.
Moon Moo-Hong, head of the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee, also plans to visit the estate on the same mission, said Seoul's unification ministry, which handles cross-border ties.
The North Tuesday announced it was quitting six-nation nuclear disarmament talks and would restart plants which produce weapons-grade plutonium, in an angry response to a UN Security Council statement which condemned its rocket launch earlier this month.
Amid the rising tensions, South Korea has delayed a widely expected announcement that it will join a US-led initiative to curb trade in weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea, a leading exporter of missiles in recent years, has warned that Seoul's participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) would be tantamount to a declaration of a war.
South Korea says the North has no reason to feel threatened by PSI, which is not aimed at specific countries.
- AFP/yb
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