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The mobile phone and jacket recovered from the site where a backhoe operator identified as Seo was found dead on Wednesday, presumably from a mobile phone battery explosion.
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A man in his 30s was killed on Wednesday in what is believed to have been a mobile-phone explosion. Around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, a worker at a quarry in Cheongwon County, North Chungcheong Province found the backhoe operator identified as Seo (33). The worker told police he found Seo lying beside his backhoe and bleeding from the nose. His phone was on fire. The worker put out the fire and called emergency services. Seo was taken to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.
A doctor in the emergency room of Chungbuk National University Hospital said Seo ¡°had a blot-shaped wound caused by a shock or impact below his left chest. The X-ray showed that his heart and lungs were damaged. It seems he died due to severe impact from a blast, considering that his ribs were fractured." The doctor added the victim had a black mobile phone with a severely melted battery in his left shirt pocket. ¡°The accident was highly likely caused by an explosion, given the damaged conditions of his shirt,¡± he said. ¡°The area near the wound indicated it was burned by a blast."
Cheongju Police is acting on the assumption that Seo was killed by the phone given that he was otherwise healthy. They asked the National Institute of Scientific Investigation to perform an autopsy and examine his cell phone to find the exact cause of death.
Seo used the latest slide phone released by a leading Korean electronics company in April. In June, the press reported that a 22-year-old welder was killed at a steel mill in Lanchow in China¡¯s Gansu Province after the mobile phone in his chest pocket exploded. This was the first time a mobile-phone explosion has killed a person in Korea.
The maker of the phone in question says the gadget was equipped with a lithium polymer battery, an improved and safer version of lithium-ion batteries, adding there had been no reports on explosions of the new batteries before.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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