North Korea in urgent need of aid

NORTH Korea is in desperate need of medical aid to treat victims of its huge train blast, UN officials warned yesterday.

But despite aid workers describing appalling scenes of suffering, the secretive and impoverished communist state appeared to shut down one route to quick relief when North Korean officials told South Korea they did not want direct overland shipments of aid.

"North Korea rejected our proposed overland transportation of emergency relief goods," said Moon Won-Il, spokesman for South Korea's National Red Cross. The decision means that the aid would take two days to reach the disaster site by sea instead of four hours, officials said.

UN officials in the North Korean capital Pyongyang said Chinese aid was finally reaching the border town of Ryongchon, where at least 161 people died and 1,300 more were injured in last Thursday's blast.

Brendan McDonald, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Pyongyang, said the blast put Ryongchong's hospital out of action. "That's a hospital that services the needs of the whole county's 123,000 people," he said.

North Korea's official KCNA news agency reported that aid was being sent to the scene and that officials were "striving to heal the damage."

But KCNA devoted more attention to evening galas marking army foundation day on Sunday.

Scores of primary school children were among those killed when the two trains exploded, obliterating a school and large parts of the town. Aid workers who visited victims at nearby Sinuiju Provincial Hospital described great suffering.

"We saw children rolling and moaning in pain, many with a lot of cuts to the face and rudimentary twine stitching," World Food Programme Asia regional director Tony Banbury said by telephone from Pyongyang.

"Some of the kids had lost sight in both eyes. Two were laid out on cabinets. Several mothers had climbed into the beds of their wounded children."

The faces of many of the injured were blackened by burns or lacerated by rubble and dust blown into the air.

Mr Banbury said that the most serious injuries were suffered by children in a nearby school who were struck by a wave of glass, rubble and heat. Many had serious eye injuries.

He warned that the hospital was "short of just about everything", including antibiotics, steroids and painkillers. Equipment wasn't plugged in, suggesting it was broken or electricity was insufficient.

Nearly half of the dead were children in the school, which was torn apart by the blast. The disaster also left thousands of Ryongchon residents homeless. Aid workers recounted seeing huge craters, twisted railroad tracks and scorched buildings. But most of the 1,300 people that North Korean officials said were injured had been evacuated before the aid workers arrived in nearby Sinuiju.

"People were cleaning up by hand and loading their meagre belongings onto ox carts," Mr Banbury said after visiting the area.

North Korea's first official report blamed the incident on carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel.

The blast took place just hours after North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's train passed through Ryongchon on his way back from China. He is widely reported to fear flying and his rail routes are heavily guarded.

Seoul has said the blast was probably an accident resulting from a rail backlog.