Posted on 04/23/2004 12:30:21 AM PDT by yonif
DANDONG, China/SEOUL (Reuters) - A collision between two fuel-laden trains in North Korea caused huge casualties, but South Korean officials said on Friday there was no way of immediately confirming reports of as many as 3,000 dead or injured.
Doctors at a nearby Chinese border city hospital braced for a major emergency after Thursday's accident at Ryongchon, which sent plumes of acrid smoke billowing over the town and rained debris for miles (kilometres) around.
"This accident is likely to have become tremendous in scale," South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun told reporters in Seoul. He said Communist North Korea had yet to confirm the disaster, but that the South considered it a fact.
The accident occurred just hours after reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had passed through en route for the capital, Pyongyang, after a rare visit to China. An intelligence source in the South said there was no hint of sabotage or an attempt on his life.
Kim usually travels in a luxury armoured train -- a gift to his father from Stalin -- because he is believed to fear flying.
South Korean media put the toll at up to 3,000 people killed or injured. The world's worst rail disaster to date was in India in 1981 when at least 800 people died after a crowded train was hit by a cyclone.
China's only official comment on the accident -- on its Foreign Ministry website (www.fmprc.gov.cn) -- said one Chinese resident had been killed and 12 injured. But it added that its Pyongyang embassy had launched emergency measures.
GEARING UP FOR CRISIS
A Chinese doctor in Dandong -- about 50 km from the accident site -- said staff were gearing up for a crisis.
"They told us to get prepared," the doctor told Reuters. "They only informed us that thousands were dead or injured."
The North gave no confirmation of the accident, but reports were emerging of widespread destruction in the town. China's Xinhua news agency said one of the trains may have leaked ammonium nitrate.
One report said a passenger train packed with Chinese travellers was in the station when the accident happened, and another that schools and houses were apparently hit in the blast.
Satellite photographs of the town posted on various websites showed it swathed in billowing dark smoke. The CIA's website says Ryongchon has a population of 130,000 and officials in Seoul say there are fuel storage sites in and around the town.
"They have already asked for help, but we can't give more details," a Dandong city government official told Reuters.
The impoverished North's creaking medical system would be hard pressed to cope with a large number of casualties -- particularly complicated burns cases.
A Beijing-based official for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the organisation was holding an emergency meeting in Pyongyang. A South Korean Red Cross delegation happens to be on a visit to the North.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service -- whose prime role is to monitor the North for signs of political instability -- said it was trying to determine what had happened.
SOUTH CALLS FOR AID FOR NORTH
Unification minister Jeong said Seoul would call for international aid for the North. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australian television his country was ready to help.
Details of the accident from various sources were sketchy.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said an emergency had been declared in the area, 15 km (10 miles) south of the Yalu river border near the Yellow Sea.
"The station was destroyed as if hit by a bombardment and debris flew high into the sky," Yonhap said, quoting unidentified Chinese sources.
"The high casualty figure was because the accident occurred in a densely populated area," Seoul's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said, quoting one unidentified source. It quoted another as saying there might have been a gas storage site nearby.
The explosion came after Kim had met China's new leadership during a rare foreign visit to discuss the North's nuclear weapons plans, tentative economic reforms that not all of his elite accept and aid that has in the past included fuel.
Yonhap quoted rumours that the trains were carrying gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas donated by China to Kim and his energy-starved country.
Yonhap quoted sources in Dandong as saying the explosion occurred at around 1 p.m. on Thursday (0400 GMT) -- nine hours after Kim's train passed through on its way back to Pyongyang. Jeong said Kim's train passed the town at night.
North Korea's official media made no mention of the disaster. Pyongyang rarely reports on accidents and only belatedly sought outside aid after floods and a famine in the 1990s.
Station officials and diplomatic sources in Beijing said trains between Pyongyang and Beijing were running normally, but a South Korean businessman in Dandong told YTN television that cross-border train services had been suspended.
The railway, which dates back to Japanese rule in the early 20th century, goes through Ryongchon, but the collision could have happened on a side track and might not have affected the main line. Ryongchon is transliterated as Yongchon in South Korea and appears that way on most maps in the West.
(Additional reporting by Juliana Liu, Zhou Xiqin and John Ruwitch in Beijing, Paul Eckert, Rhee So-eui, Yoo Choonsik and Judy Lee in Seoul, and Michelle Nichols in Canberra)
It's amazing that North Korea continues to survive as if it were in the 1950s.
It is an anachronism which refuses to die. The regime really made into an art form "being terminally ill but surviving indefinitely", while managing to scare the living daylights out of "the healthy and energetic."
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