TOKYO — Japan’s Foreign Ministry has denied a newspaper report that said the government rejected North Korea’s offer to let family members of two Japanese abductees come to Japan.

The Tokyo-based daily Sankei Shimbun reported in its May 31 edition that Pyongyang offered to let Kim Hye Gyong, 15, and Charles Robert Jenkins, 62, go to Japan in exchange for food aid. But Tokyo rejected the offer, the newspaper reported, saying that all the abductees’ relatives should be allowed to come to Japan.

The U.S. Army has listed Jenkins as a deserter since 1965, when he disappeared from his Army unit in South Korea. He is the husband of Hitomi Soga, one of five Japanese who returned last October after being abducted by North Korea in 1978. Jenkins now lives in Pyongyang with the couple’s two daughters.

Kim Hye Gyong is the daughter of Megumi Yokota, whom North Korean agents abducted from Niigata Prefecture in 1977. Yokota reportedly committed suicide in 1993, Pyongyang government officials said last fall.

“What was said about the North Korean approach, and the Japanese government rejecting it, is not a fact,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, who spoke on customary terms of anonymity. “It’s an absolutely unfounded report.”

The daily reported that two key North Korean officials, who have contacts with Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka and Kenji Hiramatsu, head of the Foreign Ministry’s North East Asia Division, made the offers on separate occasions.

The ministry spokesman told Stars and Stripes on Monday the ministry cannot comment on specific dialogues with North Korea.

Japan has no diplomatic ties with North Korea. Bilateral talks have come to a standstill since Tokyo refused to let the repatriated five return to North Korea after what was supposed to be a two-week homecoming visit last October.

— Hana Kusumoto contributed to this report.