Pyongyang offers video of files, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Japan, looking to make substantial progress in the abduction issue with North Korea, will hold a third round of talks with Pyongyang from Nov. 9 to 12, it was announced Tuesday.

North Korea also made a gesture of cooperation by producing a video it says shows medical files and passport photos of two abductees it has said are dead.

Tokyo had insisted the next meeting take place in Pyongyang instead of Beijing, the venue for talks in August and September, because it wanted intelligence officers involved in the abduction issue to be made available to provide more information.

Previously, North Korean delegates tried to avoid touchy issues by promising to get back to Pyongyang-a tactic Japanese officials hope to sidestep in the next talks, sources said.

Mitoji Yabunaka, director-general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, will head the delegation of about 15 from Tokyo. Akitaka Saiki, deputy director-general of the bureau, Hiroshi Ogura, of the Cabinet Secretariat's abductees support division, and National Police Agency staff will join the team.

North Korea's delegates are expected to include members of an investigative committee handling the reopened probe of 10 Japanese who Tokyo believes were taken by force.

North Korea said the 10 are either dead or it has no record of them entering the country.

Japan is also expected to inquire about Teruko Kase, a 17-year-old who went missing from Chiba Prefecture in 1962. A dated photograph bearing her likeness was recently revealed by a North Korean defector.

The video provided by North Korea came through diplomatic channels in Beijing late last month. Pyongyang said it shows the medical file of Megumi Yokota and a passport photograph of Keiko Arimoto -two of the 10 missing Japanese. Pyongyang has said Yokota died in 1993.

``We asked Pyongyang to give us necessary information beforehand,'' Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said Tuesday. ``So that may be why they responded this time.''

In the working-level talks held in September, North Korean officials changed their story about the fate of Yokota, who was abducted to North Korea in 1977 at age 13 while walking home from school in Niigata.

Initially they said Yokota had committed suicide while hospitalized in March 1993. But in September they let slip that she was hospitalized twice-after the alleged suicide. The video of her medical file is likely intended to support the more recent claims, officials said.

But the footage, viewed by Japanese officials in late October, is not clear enough to read the written records, sources said.

The Japanese delegation plans to demand a meeting with Yokota's husband, a North Korean reportedly living in Pyongyang. It is a move Tokyo believes is crucial for determining the fate of Yokota, sources said.

Kayoko Arimoto, mother of Keiko Arimoto, who was lured to North Korea from Europe in 1983, said Tuesday at her home in Kobe that the new information was dubious, at best.

``I want to see the passport, but it won't prove Keiko is dead,'' she said. ``If she is dead, they would have already disposed of such things.''(IHT/Asahi: November 3,2004)