On 27 April 2006, Seung-kyu Kim, the head of South Korea's intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Service, said that the five high school students abducted by North Korea during 1977 and 78, including Geon-pyo Hong, were alive and living in North Korea 8 . However no information on the whereabouts of Geon-pyo Hong was ever directly given to Geon-pyo Hong’s family by the South Korean government. 3. INFORMATION CONCERNING ACTIONS TAKEN AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE * Indicate any action taken (police inquiries, jail, human rights commission, habeas corpus petition etc.) taken by the relatives or others to locate the person. You are required to state the following: when, by whom, and before which organ the actions were taken. (a) Complaints (when, by whom, and before which organ/s) Until Mr. Hong’s family learnt from the newspaper article in 1997 that Mr. Hong was abducted by North Korean agents in 1978, Mr. Hong’s family thought that Mr. Hong was missing or became a victim of human trafficking in South Korea. Mr. Hong’s family went to the police in Cheoan, South Chungcheong Province, to report Mr. Hong’s disappearance and ask for their help looking for him. (b) Other steps taken (when, by whom, and before which organ/s) After realizing that his son was missing in 1978, Geon-pyo Hong’s father closed his business and went around Hong Do Island and Daejeon, a main city in South Chungcheong Province, and Gwangju, a main city in South Jeolla Province, in search of his son. He also published missing person advertisements in the Daejeon Ibo and Gwangju Ilbo, the main newspapers in Daejeon and Gwangju, respectively. Having learnt that his son had been abducted by North Korean agents and lived in North Korea, Mr. Hong’s father applied to the South Korean Red Cross several times to participate in an inter-Korea family reunion, a reunion of families in North and South Korea who were inadvertently separated during and after the Korean War. When Mr. Hong’s father was told that being actively involved with organizations for abductees’ families would increase his chances of being selected for the inter-Korea family reunion, despite having disabled legs, he regularly traveled to Seoul from the South Chungcheong Province to visit the Abductees Family Union, an NGO working for the abductees’ families. However, his applications for participation in the family reunion were not successful. Mr. Hong’s father passed away in 2001 without seeing Mr. Hong ever again. In 2006, Mr. Hong’s mother participated in DNA testing to determine whether the daughter of Megumi Yokota, a Japanese woman who was abducted by North Korean agents in 1977, was the daughter of Mr. Hong. Megumi Yokota was believed to be in North Korea and married to a South Korean man who was abducted by North Korean agents. But the identity of her husband was not 8 Kookmin Ilbo news article dated 27 April 2006 (http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=100&oid=005&aid=0000243324) 6