South Korea pledges €22m aid for the North

South Korea will start shipping €22.5m in relief goods next week to a North Korean town devastated by a deadly train explosion, officials said.

Reports from the North said villagers were sifting through the debris of last week’s disaster for remnants of their households and, according to the communist nation’s state news agency, their No 1 treasure – portraits of leader Kim Jong Il.

A pro-North Korean newspaper in Japan reported that a boy was rescued four days after the blast hit his flimsy primary school, burying him under broken tiles and gravel.

“I am hungry,” the boy said as he was pulled out, the People’s Korea reported.

As the campaign for international aid picked up, South Korea today accepted the North’s requests for 50,000 tons of cement, 10,000 tons of food, 10 bulldozers, 10 steam shovels, 500 tons of diesel oil, 500 tons of gasoline, 1,500 sets of school desks and chairs, 50 blackboards, 10,000 tons of food, and 50 television sets.

Most of the aid will go through China’s Dandong port on the North Korean border before May 15, as requested by North Korea, Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun told a news briefing.

Separately, a South Korean ship with €750,000 worth of instant noodles, blankets and bottled water arrived in a Northern port today after a daylong voyage.

While seeking outside aid, North Korea’s propaganda-filled news media put a totalitarian spin on their coverage of the disaster.

The official KCNA news agency lauded the “heroic deaths” of four people who rushed into collapsing or burning buildings to retrieve portraits of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and his late father and national founder, Great Leader Kim Il Sung.

“The Korean people’s spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives was fully displayed,” it said, adding that teacher Han Jong Suk, 56, “breathed her last with portraits in her bosom”.

Many people “evacuated portraits before searching after their family members”, it said.

The death toll from the April 22 train blast in Ryongchon, near the Chinese border, stood at 161 today, with 370 still in hospital – many of them children.

South Korea’s KBS television network said the train that exploded had first been on fire for about 40 minutes, attracting a crowd of onlookers. Casualties could have been reduced if officials had cleared the area before the trainload of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil went off, it said.

North Korea has rejected Seoul’s offer to truck supplies across their heavily fortified border. The refusal meant supplies that could have been sent in a day will now arrive a day or two later by ship.

Pyongyang also refused to let South Korean doctors go to the area, where thousands were living in tents without adequate sanitation or water. A team of foreign aid workers visited yesterday to assess the situation.

Relief workers described people struggling to rebuild with their bare hands.