Captagon

WASHINGTON, March 4 Kyodo

The United States has found ''strong reason'' and increasingly suspects that the North Korean government is involved in drug trafficking, the State Department said in an annual report Friday.

''The United States will continue to monitor developments in North Korea to test the validity of the judgment that drugs are probably being trafficked under the guidance of the state, and to see if evidence emerges confirming manufacture of heroin and methamphetamine,'' the department said in the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

The report details new cases of suspected illicit activities during 2004 and reiterated that it is ''likely, though not certain that the DPRK is a state trading narcotics.'' DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea.

''There is also strong reason to believe that methamphetamine and heroin are manufactured in North Korea as a result of the same state-directed conspiracy behind trafficking,'' said the report.

In June, two North Korean diplomats working at the North Korean Embassy in Egypt were arrested for ''attempting to deliver 150,000 tablets of Clonazipam,'' a synthetic drug, and subsequently expelled.

In a separate incident, two North Korean diplomats working at the embassy in Bulgaria were traveling and ''caught in a drug raid in Turkey and found to be carrying over half a million Captagon tablets'' allegedly destined for Arab markets in December, the report said. They were returned to Bulgaria and then expelled by the Bulgarian government.

Both incidents ''are the first to come to light in several years involving DPRK officials stationed abroad at embassies caught smuggling narcotics,'' the report said.

In addition, the department points to a February article written by a ''high-level'' North Korean defector which says, ''Poppy cultivation and heroin and methamphetamine production were conducted in North Korea by order of the regime.''

While saying the article has ''not been conclusively verified by independent sources,'' the department acknowledged the consistency of stories by various defectors ''over years.''

The department also said there were ''reports of more organized smuggling of heroin along the DPRK's border with China'' as well as ''other evidence of close cooperation between Chinese criminals and North Korean criminals in heroin and methamphetamine smuggling to foreign markets.''

As described in the 2003 report, the mid-April 2003 seizure of the ''Pong Su,'' a vessel owned by a North Korean enterprise delivering 125 kilograms of heroin to Australia, also figured in this year's 2004 report.

The trial to convict those involved began in late January in Australia and will continue for at least four to five months, said the report.

The report also noted that illicit activities by the North Korean government occur within the context of a range of criminal activities admitted to by North Korean officials, including the kidnapping of Japanese nationals in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

The department said there were no seizures of methamphetamines in Japan during 2004 linked to North Korea, noting that as much as 30 percent to 40 percent of methamphetamines seized in Japan in past years have been linked by Japanese enforcement officials to North Korea.

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