North Korea recently replied to a U.N. inquiry into the fate of the wife and two daughters left behind by a South Korean man who escaped the North in 1986 a year after defecting there with his family.

In the letter sent to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on April 27, it claimed Shin Suk-ja, the wife of Oh Kil-nam, died of hepatitis and the two daughters did not want to see Oh, whom they did not regard as their father because he abandoned his family and drove their mother to her death.

The reply is apparently far from acceptable to Oh, a 70-year-old retired economist, and to the human rights group that submitted a petition on his behalf to the U.N. group in November, asking for help in having his family released.

Above all, it made no specific mention of when and where Shin died.

At a news conference in Seoul on Tuesday, Oh said he did not buy North Korea’s explanation. He said it was “once again telling a manipulated story,” just as it did to Japanese families whose members were abducted by agents from Pyongyang.

It might be true that Shin died of the disease, which her husband admitted she had suffered from before entering North Korea in 1985.

If so, it would be reasonable for the North to accept the rights group’s demand that it send her remains to the South along with medical records to verify its claim. There would also be no reason for barring her daughters from meeting their father in a third country to help clear the suspicions.

But such response appears unlikely to come from North Korea.

It was probably unable to make public concrete circumstances surrounding Shin’s death, which would have been tantamount to acknowledging that she and her daughters had been detained in a prison camp.

Several North Korean defectors here have testified that they saw Oh’s family in the Yodeok political prison camp, notorious for its harsh conditions and inhumane treatment of inmates, which we believe would have severely worsened Shin’s illness.

Pyongyang’s reply was intended to scuttle efforts to secure the release of Oh’s wife and daughters by insisting that the family relationship between them no longer exists.

Such a brazen attempt comes across as nonsense. It will do nothing to deflect international interests in the case of Oh’s family and concerns about its dire human rights conditions.