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North Korea makes pleas for help after massive explosion

Aid workers rushed to the scene of a devastating train blast yesterday after North Korea made unprecedented pleas for help and blamed carelessness for the disaster, saying downed power lines detonated a cargo of oil and ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer also used in explosives and rocket fuel.

Normally secretive North Korean officials told foreign diplomats and relief organizations that hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured in Thursday's explosion near the Chinese border.

The numbers were expected to climb amid eyewitness accounts of a massive eruption. Chinese villagers 20km away said they were shaken by the force of the blast and saw a black, mushroom-shaped cloud tower over the horizon.

In its first statement on the disaster, North Korea's official news agency said the catastrophic explosion in the railway town of Ryongchon was touched off by "electrical contact caused by carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer."

Separately, the Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted North Korean officials as saying trains loaded with oil and chemicals collided and were ignited by a downed power line.

Few foreign journalists are allowed into North Korea. But in the first report datelined from the site, Xinhua said at least 154 people were confirmed dead, half of them students, and 1,300 were injured.

In an uncharacteristically candid report, the North's news agency KCNA said "the damage is very serious" and expressed appreciation for promises of international humanitarian assistance.

Those offers came in the hours after the North issued a rare appeal for foreign help, inviting aid workers to come see the disaster site in Ryongchon, a city with chemical and metalworking plants and a reported population of 130,000.

US defense officials have said that damage from the blast extended at least 200m from the railway station. Diplomats and aid groups were told by the North that thousands of apartments and houses were destroyed or damaged.

An aid convoy was headed to the site yesterday carrying antibiotics, bandages, painkillers and other supplies -- all of which are scarce in the impoverished country, said John Sparrow, a Red Cross spokesman in Beijing.

"We are fearful that they could be overwhelmed by the large numbers of injured," he said, adding that many people might have been made homeless and would need tents and other shelter.

North Korea restricts the movement of foreigners, and groups that distribute aid to alleviate its food shortages are barred from some areas.

Aid workers have been allowed to visit areas struck by drought or floods in recent years, but the government has never arranged such quick access to the scene of a disaster like the train explosion.

Those visiting the site yesterday were not allowed to carry mobile communications, said Brendan McDonald, head of the UN office for coordination in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

North Korean officials told Britain's ambassador that "several hundred people were thought to have died and several thousand were injured," a British Foreign Office spokesman said.
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