Up to 3 000 people were dead or injured after two trains carrying fuel collided and exploded on Thursday at a North Korean railway station near the Chinese border, reports said.
The blast was so powerful it destroyed the railway station at Ryongchon just nine hours after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il passed through it on his return from a trip to China.
North Korea declared a state of emergency around the site of the blast, which resembled a war zone, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted Chinese sources as saying.
Up to 3 000 people were dead or injured, according to Seoul’s YTN news channel. Yonhap, also citing Chinese sources, said the number of casualties could reach into the thousands.
South Korean media said the explosion occurred when two cargo trains carrying fuel collided at Ryongchon, 50km south of the North Korean border with China.
South Korean officials confirmed that a blast had occurred.
“It is true there was a large explosion in North Korea today,” an official said, requesting anonymity.
“We are still trying to confirm other details.”
A Defence Ministry official told Yonhap it had yet to confirm “the cause of the incident, the kind of explosion and how many died”.
The entire area “was turned into ruins comparable to the aftermath of a massive bombing”, Yonhap said, quoting witnesses.
North Korean authorities were investigating the cause of the accident, Yonhap said.
But North Korea’s official media was silent on the blast and the government immediately cut off international phone services to the devastated area in an effort to impose a news blackout, Yonhap said.
Many of the injured were taken to hospitals across the border in the Chinese city of Dandong, Seoul’s MBC television said.
Other reports said China had sealed off the border with North Korea at Dandong, on the rail line that leads to Ryongchon, a strategic coastal area.
Chinese traders and visitors are normally relatively free to enter and leave North Korea at the border post, passing into the North Korean town of Sinuiju.
One report said the gas that one of the trains was carrying was a donation from China to energy-starved North Korea, locked in an 18-month standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons drive.
Only hours before the blast, North Korean supreme leader Kim passed through the area on his special train returning to Pyongyang from a three-day visit to Beijing. Media reports in Seoul said there were no grounds to suspect foul play or an attempt on the leader’s life.
China said that during his stay in the country, Beijing had agreed to supply aid to the Stalinist state whose economy is close to collapse following years of natural disasters and poor economic management.
Citing security reasons, Kim prefers to travel by train when travelling abroad to China, and also in a 2001 visit to Moscow. — AFP