South Korea has mounted a huge land, sea and air operation to protect Asia-Pacific leaders, deploying over 37,000 personnel and enforcing draconian exclusion zones, officials said yesterday.
A spokesman for the port city of Busan, Steve Tang, said 37,000 officers from South Korea's national intelligence service, police, military, fire service, coast guard and customs were on high alert for the APEC meetings which opened yesterday.
The measures include a no-fly and no-vessel zone within a 7km radius from Nurimaru APEC house, a dome-shaped structure on Busan's coast where APEC leaders will be holding a retreat.
"It's not only the sky but the sea [that] will be guarded," Tang said.
The city's police, who have been on emergency duty since Oct. 19, have been deployed to subway stations to monitor suspicious activities, while garbage bins, potential hiding places for bombs, have been removed.
Body searches are being performed at airports, and at Busan Port's international passenger terminal and subways, while all cargo and mail is being X-rayed, a government statement said.
Coast guard patrol boats and hovercrafts are sweeping the city's coastline, while divers, bomb disposal experts and snipers are taking part in anti-terrorism exercises.
Delegates said nervousness about security had intensified since the hotel bombings in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday, which have been blamed on the al-Qaeda network.
As well as the threat of terrorist attack, the authorities here are also bracing for huge anti-globalization protests aimed to coincide with the APEC summit on Friday and Saturday which will be attended by US President George W. Bush.
More than 40,000 protesters marched against Bush at a summit of the Americas in Argentina last week. Violence erupted when several hundred demonstrators pelted police with rocks and Molotov cocktails.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS