NORTH KOREA: International aid agencies geared up yesterday for a massive rescue operation in the North Korean town of Ryongchon after North Korea acknowledged the train disaster there and appealed for help.
The blast, believed to have been caused when an electric cable ignited a train carriage of high explosives destined for a mine, is believed to have damaged more than 8,000 homes, 2,000 of which were completely destroyed.
Initial North Korean casualty figures of some 54 dead and 1,249 wounded rose last night when the authorities acknowledged several hundred people had died.
Earlier, the North Korean government took the extraordinary step of formally asking for help from international agencies. The request, which did not go into detail, was sent to the United Nations' main emergency relief organisation, the New York-based UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The OCHA, quoting figures from the Red Cross, said that 50 bodies had so far been recovered from the blast in the town of Ryongchon, near the Chinese border, but with such widespread destruction, the death toll is expected to be much higher.
But the regional director of Concern, the Irish relief agency with an office in Pyongyang, said some of the dead were schoolchildren.
A British Foreign Office spokeswoman, citing North Korean officials, said last night: "North Korean officials are saying there are several hundred dead and several thousand injured."
Ms Ann O'Mahony, the regional director of Concern in North Korea, told RTÉ radio that international aid agencies have been invited to visit the scene of the train explosion today.
There were fears that North Korea's ageing, woeful medical system would be unable to deal with a large influx of casualties, particularly burns victims.
A doctor in the Chinese city of Dandong, about 30 miles from the accident site, said staff were gearing up for a crisis.
"They told us to get prepared. They only informed us that thousands were dead or injured," he told Reuters.
The explosion took place at around 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, just hours after the country's leader, Mr Kim Jong-il, passed through on his way back from China. It was so powerful that it completely demolished the railway station and other buildings in a 500-metre radius, eyewitnesses said.
Satellite photographs of the town posted on websites showed it covered in clouds of dark smoke. The website of the US Central Intelligence Agency says Ryongchon has a population of 130,000 and officials in Seoul say there are fuel storage sites in and around the town.
For nearly a full day after the disaster, North Korea kept silent about the crash. Pyongyang rarely reports on accidents and only belatedly sought outside aid after floods and a famine in the 1990s.
Immediately after the explosion, North Korea cut international telephone services to the area in what looked like an effort to prevent news of the devastation getting out.
North Korean authorities finally relented and gave United Nations relief agencies permission to travel to the crash site late yesterday and the mission would travel there over the weekend.
"The authorities have accepted the offer of UN help and agreed to an evaluation mission by UN agencies," said Ms Christiane Berthiaume, spokeswoman for the World Food Programme.
It was still unclear exactly how the crash happened. Analysts said the situation was probably made worse by the dilapidated state of the rail network, most of which was built during the Japanese occupation between 1910 and 1945.