If someone can explain the North Korean behavior regarding the fate and whereabouts of Megumi Yokota, I’d sure like to hear it.

The North Koreans have to know their latest claim in the controversy makes it even less likely they will receive financial assistance and food aid from Japan, which was the reason they came clean about their abductions of Japanese citizens to begin with. Pyongyang has enough eyes and ears in Japan to know what media coverage and public sentiment has been like. And if Kim Jong Il watches CNN, as reported, he likely has a way to watch Japanese television, too.

Here’s the story to date. Everyone assumes that North Korea admitted to abducting Japanese citizens in the late 70s to create a thaw in relations with Japan so the Japanese would show them some money and feed them out of gratitude. Now that the Hasuike, Chimura, and Soga families have been repatriated safely, the highest-profile case in Japan is that of Megumi Yokota.

Yokota was a 13-year-old middle school student snatched by North Korean operatives on her way home from school. She eventually married and had a daughter, but the North Koreans claimed she later became mentally unstable and committed suicide.

There is a strong possibility that didn’t happen. It turns out that in their initial burst of candor, the North Koreans provided Japan with bogus death certificates for several of the abductees, as well as the bones of an old woman instead of those for a young Japanese man they said had died. It also was reported that people have seen Yokota alive after the date she reportedly hung herself.

Her parents, in their 70s now, have become the most visible symbols of the issue in Japan today, as they have been tireless in pushing the government and driving public opinion, particularly through television appearances.

Pyongyang attempted to gain some traction by allowing Yokota’s daughter, Kim Hye Gyong, 15 at the time, to be interviewed by a Japanese TV network. She does not live with her remarried father and may wind up in Japan with her grandparents. In fact, NK offered to let her go to Japan a year or so ago before the Hasuike and Chimura children were returned—on the condition that the parents come back to pick them up. (As if.) But none of that worked.

The North Koreans finally handed over some of what they said were the cremated remains of Megumi last year. It is very difficult to identify DNA from cremated remains, but the Japanese say they have verified they aren’t those of Yokota. I can think of nothing the Japanese and Prime Minister Koizumi would gain and plenty they can lose by lying about this.

After this news broke, however, the North Koreans played Tar Baby. The Tar Baby just sits there and don’t say nothin’. You’d think they’d be ready with an immediate response—even if the response was, “That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”

Nope. They let a month go by before saying anything in public. They finally broke their silence by saying that the Japanese fabricated the DNA results. The basis for their assertion was the fact that remains cremated at temperatures of 1,200 degrees cannot be identified. They also claimed the Japanese had promised not to tell anyone they gave the remains back. (These two sound to a lot of people like a tacit admission that the remains were fake to begin with.) They then demanded that the Japanese return the remains. (Why? So they can rebury them in the grave they stole them from?)

This has further angered a country already furious. What did the North Koreans hope to gain by providing any information they knew would be revealed as false, the veracity of their claims about Yokota notwithstanding? Why did they take a month to come up with this story?

Some claim that the North Koreans are not ‘fessing up because the remaining abductees know too much about Pyongyang government and espionage activities. Charles Jenkins, the husband of Hitomi Soga who recently finished serving his time in a U.S. Army brig for desertion, said the reason it took so long for NK to release his two daughters is that they were being groomed as spies.

You tell me. Here are the Japanese and English links to the story.