North Korea seeks international aid

North Korea said on Friday several hundred people were killed and thousands injured in a train explosion and issued a rare appeal for intern...

North Korea said on Friday several hundred people were killed and thousands injured in a train explosion and issued a rare appeal for international help to deal with the disaster.

Britain’s Foreign Office quoted N Korean officials putting the death toll at several hundred in the blast which razed part of the town of Ryongchon, near the Chinese border. In Geneva, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it had received a request for international help from Pyongyang on Friday afternoon.

The request did not go into detail but the appeal was echoed by North Korea’s ambassador to the UN in New York who said the accident had been ‘‘due to carelessness’’. ‘‘We need the help of the international community. Emergency relief,’’ envoy Pak Gil Yon said. N Korea’s media has made no mention of Thursday’s blast but the reclusive and impoverished communist state has accepted offers of help from international aid and relief agencies.

The OCHA in Geneva, quoting figures from the Red Cross, said 50 bodies had so far been recovered from Thursday’s blast. But the regional director of Concern, a relief agency with an office in Pyongyang, said 150 people had died, including schoolchildren.

International aid agencies have also been invited to visit the scene of the train blast. Besides WFP, the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF, the Red Cross and representatives of the some 20 NGOs will travel to the area to evaluate needs, said spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume in Geneva.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency quoted N Korean government sources as saying that the blast was caused by an electrical accident. John Sparrow, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said 1,850 homes were destroyed. The CIA’s website says Ryongchon has a population of 130,000 and there are fuel storage sites in and around the town. —(Reuters)