An emergency evacuation warning sent to people in Japan after a North Korean missile launch on Thursday morning was not sent in error, a Japanese government official said, even though the alert was retracted. Residents on the northern island of Hokkaido were told to evacuate and “seek shelter immediately” by the country’s J-Alert warning system over fears that a missile was about to hit, though the alert was later dropped and initially blamed on a malfunction. “We did not correct the information issued by the J-Alert” system, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno explained at a news conference. He said instead that the missile vanished from Japanese radar immediately after it was detected, and that further analysis showed it would not hit Japanese soil. “The J-Alert warning was issued to inform citizens of the danger of a falling missile to prioritize citizen' safety,” Matsuno added.
