The head and seven employees of a Japanese trading firm were arrested Saturday for importing North Korean clams by labelling them as Chinese, police said, in an effort to bypass a ban on imports from the communist state.
Japan banned all imports and ships, as well as almost all visitors from North Korea, after Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear bomb test last October.
It is expected to extend the six-month ban when it expires in mid-April as a means to pressure the North to return all the Japanese nationals it had kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s.
The company, Toen Boeki K.K., is based in the western Japan prefecture of Yamaguchi and specialises in seafood imports. Its president Noboru Fujioka, 59, and seven of his employees were arrested on charges of unauthorised imports, a Yamaguchi prefectural police official said.
"The company chartered a Chinese freighter in importing about 55 tonnes of littleneck clams from North Korea in February," Toshiaki Kobayashi, director of foreign affairs at the prefectural police, said by telephone.
The clams were suspected to have been loaded aboard the freighter Hai Xing 3 at a North Korean port but the company said they were Chinese products, he said. The ship arrived at Shimonoseki port in Yamaguchi, on the western tip of Japan's main island of Honshu on February 22.
The ship's captain Liu Mingguo, 58, and 11 crew members were arrested earlier after it arrived at the port again on March 8 with 76 tonnes of clams presumed to have been loaded in North Korea. Liu has also been charged with the illegal imports linked to the Japanese company. On Saturday, the 11 crew members were also formally presented with the same charge, Kobayashi said.
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