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A Red Cross official in Beijing said Friday that North Korea has asked the organization to visit the site of Thursday night's massive train collision and subsequent explosion.
According to a source in the Chinese border town of Dandong, not only was Ryongcheon Station destroyed in the blast, but so were the nearby school and a large number of civilian dwellings; casualties are presumed to be very high, Yonhap News reported.
The source said a Chinese who saw the scene of the accident and returned to Dandong said the area around Ryoncheon Station "had been transformed into ruins, like it was bombed... It was still difficult to grasp exactly how many casualties there were."
The casualty total is presumed to be high, however, since this area -- with a school and a high concentration of houses and apartments -- was totally destroyed.
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A satellite photo of the North Korean city of Ryongchon taken May 13, 2003 shows the train line running from the top left of the image to the bottom center. /Reuters
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It's known that a large number of ethnic Chinese live in Ryongcheon and a fair number of them were either killed or wounded in the blast. There are rumors that some of the wounded from the blast have been evacuated to Dandong for treatment, but that has yet to be confirmed.
It was first thought that the explosion was caused when a train carrying liquefied petroleum gas and another train carrying oil collided, but the possibility that the LP gas train collided with a tanker truck cannot be excluded.
Meanwhile, China is known to be considering various forms of assistance in accordance with North Korean requests for help in coping with the disaster.
South Korean Acting President Goh Kun instructed the Unification and Foreign ministries to quickly find out the exact situation in the disaster area and, if necessary, prepare humanitarian assistance.
The South Korean Embassy in Beijing is meeting with Chinese government officials in trying to get an understanding of the situation, while the South Korea Consulate in Shenyang is investigating the scale of the disaster through cooperation with an ethnic Korean association in Dandong.
Of the 700 South Korean expatriates living in Dandong, none appeared to have been hurt and there do not appear to be any South Korean victims at the blast site itself.
The Chinese-Korean Friendship Railway Bridge, which crosses the Yalu River and is home to the customs office, is still open to tourist and normal traffic, and car traffic on other overland routes appears normal. International phone service between Ryongcheon and Dandong, however, is still down.
There has yet to be any official announcements by the Chinese government concerning the accident, but China's state-owned Xinhua News Service briefly reported the accident in a Thursday night dispatch from Seoul. In addition, Chinese newspapers, including the state-owned English-language paper China Daily, and the Chinese Internet news website SINA have been citing Yonhap News while giving relatively detailed accounts of the incident.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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