Yahoo! News – North Korea Appeals for Aid After Blast
Issuing a rare appeal for foreign help, North Korea (news – web sites)’s secretive government said Friday that a devastating train explosion killed several hundred people, and it invited aid workers to come see the disaster site.
North Korean officials told diplomats and aid groups that more than 1,000 people were injured and thousands of apartments and houses destroyed or damaged by the blast at a railway station Thursday near the Chinese border.
They said many more could be trapped in collapsed buildings near the station in the city of Ryongchon, home to chemical and metalworking plants and a reported population of 130,000. Red Cross workers were distributing tents and blankets to 4,000 families.
But while the communist North disclosed some details of the blast to the outside world, its state-controlled domestic media remained silent on the disaster.
The British Broadcasting Corp. showed on its Web site what it said was a satellite photo taken 18 hours after the explosion. The black-and-white photo showed huge clouds of dark smoke billowing from the site.
Initial reports described a collision, but aid workers said North Korean officials on Friday blamed an electrical accident with a train carrying explosives.
“What they’ve said is that two carriages of a train carrying dynamite � they were trying to disconnect the carriages and link them up to another train,” Anne O’Mahony, regional director for the Irish aid agency Concern, told Irish radio station RTE from Pyongyang.
“They got caught in the overhead electric wiring, the dynamite exploded, and that was the cause of the explosion,” she said.
I hope an infusion of outside aid will be an opportunity to show the North Koreans we do care about them. I think they’ve been cut off from the world for far too long.