North Korea has announced a halt to an investigation into the fate of Japanese citizens said to have been abducted by its agents decades ago, retaliating for sanctions Japan imposed this week after the North’s latest rocket launching.

North Korea blamed Japan for the development in a report on Friday from its official Korean Central News Agency, saying that Tokyo’s new sanctions were “little short of the declaration of its own scrapping” of a 2014 agreement under which North Korea set up a panel to investigate the abduction issue. The panel and its investigation were terminated as of Friday, the report said.

Japan’s foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, called North Korea’s decision “deplorable,” the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported.