S. Korea, China, EU send aid in wake of rail blast

One aid agency official said the area looked like it had been hit by a fireball.
WASHINGTON POST
TOKYO -- International aid workers responding to a rare request for assistance from the North Korean government described a stark scene of devastation at the site of Thursday's rail explosion, including an incinerated primary school where 76 students were believed to have been killed.
The children were among 154 dead from the blast, in which an estimated 1,300 were injured, according to Red Cross officials who briefed reporters in Beijing after receiving reports from the blast site.
North Korean officials, through the Pyongyang government's official Korean Central News Agency, said the blast at the Ryongchon train station 12 miles from the border with China was caused by human error during the shunting of a train carrying chemical fertilizer and tank wagons.
John Sparrow, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told reporters the site "looks as though a fireball has swept through."
He added that a school had been totally destroyed. An additional 129 public buildings, including hospitals, were demolished or damaged. An area spanning several hundred square yards was leveled by the blast, which hurled debris more than two miles.
Aid workers said North Korean authorities had searched through much of the wreckage for injured before they arrived.
Nations offer aid
South Korea announced it would immediately dispatch an emergency aid package of $1 million. Unification Minister Jeong Se Hyun, the country's highest-ranking official on North Korean policy, said a team of relief workers would coordinate terms of further assistance in a meeting with North Koreans on Monday at Panmunjom, the truce village in the Demilitarized Zone between the two nations.
China, North Korea's most important ally and benefactor, offered $1.2 million in emergency relief. And China's official New China News Agency said President Hu Jintao had telephoned North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to offer condolences.
The European Union approved $240,000 for emergency medical aid and temporary shelters.
Kim had returned to Pyongyang by train via Ryongchon after a summit in China only hours before Thursday's explosion. However, U.S., South Korean and Chinese officials have said the explosion appears to have been the result of an accident.
Unusual candor
The direct and relatively quick admission of the accident -- and the citing of human error -- was a rare departure for North Korea, which typically is silent on all news casting an even remotely negative light on the totalitarian government. It was years before Pyongyang requested relief after widespread famines in the mid- to late 1990s.
North Korea, however, remains at a stalemate in its program to develop nuclear weapons. Selig S. Harrison, an American scholar in Beijing after his eighth trip to Pyongyang, said top North Korean officials pledged during four days of talks with him that their government would never transfer nuclear materials to other nations or terrorist groups.
He described that statement as unusually frank and aimed at rebutting U.S. charges that the North could be spreading nuclear weapons technology.
But Harrison, a prominent expert on the two Koreas, also said the officials warned that North Korea would continue to develop nuclear weapons as long as the United States resisted its offer to freeze its programs in exchange for economic and energy aid.