Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho makes an opening speech during a forum in Seoul, April 26, in this photo provided by the Ministry of Unification. Yonhap

Kim Yung-ho, South Korea's point man on North Korea, and Julie Turner, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights, plan to make a visit next month to areas where then South Korean teens had been abducted by the North in the 1970s, a Seoul official said Friday.

Kim and Turner will visit the Seonyu and Hong islands in the country's southwestern region in late May, a plan organized at the request of the families of the victims, according to South Korea's envoy for North Korean human rights, Lee Shin-wha.

The five victims, who were high school students at the time of the incident, were kidnapped between 1977 and 1978.

Among them, Kim Young-nam was married in North Korea with Megumi Yokota, a Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s when she was 13. Kim is believed to have been abducted by the North in 1978 in areas near Seonyu Island and Megumi is a symbol of Japanese people abducted by North Korea.

Lee made the remark in a forum organized by the unification ministry to discuss updating a 2014 report compiled by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) on North Korea's human rights situation. The landmark report accused Pyongyang of committing "systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations."

During the forum, Kim called for continued efforts by the international community to resolve the issue of detainees, abductees and prisoners of war in the North.

Of an estimated 3,835 South Koreans who were kidnapped by North Korea after the 1950-53 Korean War, 3,310 people were sent back home and nine escaped the repressive regime, with the other 516 South Koreans having yet to return home, according to government data.

Six South Koreans, including three missionaries, have been held in North Korea for years, with their whereabouts and fates unknown. (Yonhap)