Most Bizaare Crime Committed by a State

The 12th Annual Slamdance Film Festival next month will be featuring a documentary film accounting what one newspaper in 2002 had described as one of the most bizarre crimes ever committed by a state.

“Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story" will make its premiere showing in a shocking and still mysterious account of the disappearance of a young Japanese schoolgirl and the crime of the North Korean regime.

In 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota vanished while returning home from badminton practice after school. Her untraceable disappearance left her parents in grief as decades passed without a clue of her whereabouts or of the incident itself.

It was later found the Megumi was one of 12 Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean spies.

Reports of sightings of Megumi began to surface sixteen years later, revealing that she had been seen in Pyongyang. A North Korean defector claimed that Megumi was living at a training institute for intelligence agents in North Korea along with other abducted Japanese to teach their spies the Japanese language and culture.

North Korea had denied the claims. More defector accounts, however, attesting to Megumi's abduction exploded in the media worldwide. Reports revealed that Megumi was carried off on a spy boat and arrived in Pyongyang covered in blood as she had tried to scratch at the hull.

In September 2002, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, to whom he acknowledged and apologized for the kidnapping of the Japanese citizens. Kim claimed they were captured to serve as language instructors for North Korean agents.

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