Free Republic

The people of North Korea are not as submissive as they appear to be. Unnoticed by the outside world, strong opposition to the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il is beginning to appear. On April 22, two trains loaded with chemicals exploded in the city of Ryongchon. Although 169 people died or were horribly disfigured, including a large number of children from a nearby school, no functionaries appeared in the city to comfort the injured and the relatives of the victims. President Kim Jong Il did not even condescend to issuing a telegram offering his condolences. The state-owned news agency...

/begin my translation [Ryongchon Mystery]Who Blew Up Ryongchon? It has been almost two months since Ryongchon Train Explosion occurred in N. Korea. A plenty of relief aids were sent from all over the world, when the world saw pictures of children badly wounded by the blast. According to Lee Jong-hyuk, the vice chairman of N. Korean Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, who visited Seoul on June 14th, the reconstruction and repair of Ryongchon would be complete by coming October. Its residents, especially those wounded children, could soon start smiling again at their new homes and schools. However, under such an uplifting outlook,...

1997 Train Disaster Claims Death Toll of 2,400 People North Korean railroad trains, due to obsolete tracks and diminishing funding, have long been exposed to danger. In 1997, a passenger train that departed from Haeju, South Hwanghae Province, and headed to Manpo, Jagang Province, derailed on a bridge on a descending slope called Kaegogae Hill between Huichon and Chonchon, and plunged into the valley tens of meters below. It was a horrible disaster, leaving few people alive. Passengers were packed into the train like sardines. People's Army units stationed nearby were mobilized to look after the aftermath, with no villagers...

North Korea train explosion meant for Kim Jong Il The World Today - Monday, 14 June , 2004 12:18:00 Reporter: Mark Simkin ELEANOR HALL: A report from Pyongyang suggests that April's deadly train explosion was in fact an assassination attempt on North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. More than one hundred people died and thousands were injured in disaster. At the time, the communist country said the blast was caused by electrical cables accidentally coming in contact with ammonium nitrate. It's thought that Kim Jong Il's train passed through the site just a few hours before the explosion. Joining me...

Officials investigating the devastating North Korean train explosion in April now believe that the blast was an assassination attempt on the country's leader, Kim Jong-il. At the time, the secretive Communist state described the explosion in the border town of Ryongchon as an accident. Electric cables were believed to have ignited a cargo of explosive chemicals and oil. Now, however, officials close to the investigation believe that a mobile telephone was used to detonate the train's deadly cargo of ammonium nitrate and fuel. The remains of a mobile handset, with adhesive tape attached, have been found at the scene of...

/begin my translation N. Korea: Syrians Present At the Ryongchon Explosion Site (new details:bio/chem-tipped missiles) Dead Syrians sent home about a week after the accident. While the train explosion at Ryongchon station, N. Pyongan Province, N. Korea, on 22nd of last April, still generates many speculations on its possible causes, including a failed assassination of Kim Jong-il, a freak accident, a staged accident by N. Koreans, it is now confirmed that there were many Syrians among the casualties of the explosion. According to a knowledgeable intelligence source on N. Korean matters, about a week after the accident, on May 1st,...

Sights of Silence By RICHARD RAGAN as told to JAMES BROOKE Published: May 23, 2004 North Korea is a whisker smaller than my home state, Mississippi. But when I heard about the explosion last month at Ryongchon train station, I knew I was in for a long, hard drive. As the crow flies, it was 300 miles. But I was in the northeast corner of the country, near the Russian border, when I heard the news on the BBC. With North Korea's bumpy dirt roads and circuitous routes, our convoy of white Toyota Land Cruisers faced a three-day, 800-mile road...

Rebuilding, Rumors Robust 5 Weeks After N.Korea Blast Thu May 27, 6:16 AM ET Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo! By Paul Eckert and John Ruwitch SEOUL/BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korean workers are rapidly rebuilding the town destroyed by a deadly train blast last month, but the rumor mill about the explosion is working just as fast. Aid workers and diplomats who assessed rumors and sketchy reports about the cause of the April 22 explosion at Ryongchon and about draconian North Korean responses say it is hard to draw firm conclusions in the atmosphere of secrecy. The explosion, which...

North Korean Security Believes Ryongchon Explosion an Assassination Attempt According to a source, North Korea's State Safety & Security Agency concluded that the massive explosion that occurred in the North Korean city of Ryongchon on April 22 had been conspired by anti-North Korean government forces to harm North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. A North Korean official who was recently on his business trip to China said, “The North Korean National Security Agency has investigated the incident since it took place and concluded that rebellious forces had plotted the explosions targeting the exclusive train of Kim Jong-il. The security agency, in...

/begin my translation Ryongchon Explosion Occurred While Transporting Military Cargo? Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese Daily, reported on 7th (of May, 2004), "In Ryongchon Blast, Syrian engineers were killed and wounded. A wagon carrying a large cargo had a particularly heavy damage, revealed on 6th (of May, 2004) by a military news source who has great expertise on Korean matters." According to the source, "the content of the cargo is unknown. However, after the accident, N. Korean military personnels in protective suits arrived at the scene, and recovered the remains of the destroyed wagon. We strongly suspect that the accident occurred...

N. Korean rail explosion foiled missile shipment to Syria SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Tuesday, May 18, 2004 A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and killed about a dozen Syrian technicians. U.S. officials confirmed a report in a Japanese daily newspaper that a train explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near the Chinese border to...

North Korea exchanging seccret WMD's?

Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper

A military source familiar with Korean Peninsula affairs revealed on 6 May that Syrian technicians were killed in a train explosion incident that occurred on 22 April in Yongch'on in the northwestern part of the DPRK and that the damage was especially serious in that section of the train where the Syrians were aboard, along with large equipment. The same source noted that although the contents of the equipment are unknown, DPRK military-related personnel wearing protective suits arrived on the scene immediately after the explosion and removed debris only from that section of the train where the Syrian group had...

Although the government of North Korea now spins a different story, both initial Korean reports and American satellite photographs suggest that the devastating explosion on April 22 in Ryongchon, North Korea, was an eerie replay of the Taggart Tunnel train crash in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged." In Rand's novel, an incipient fascist dictatorship in America is stopped in its tracks by a strike of the men of the mind. In "Atlas Shrugged," as in Ryongchon, the hobbling of human minds by dictatorship brought about a return to the ancient technology of open-fire steam locomotives. In both, the immediate...

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea (news - web sites) reportedly agreed Friday to open its heavily armed border for relief goods from the South, countering criticism it would rather remain isolated than accept aid for victims of a deadly train explosion. North Korea's Red Cross sent a telephone message to its South Korean counterpart Friday, saying it would allow South relief trucks to travel to the town of Kaesong just across the countries' border, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. Other local media carried similar reports. Red Cross and government officials were not available for comment. In its message,...

Comparison photos here I'm not sure if it's OK to post the pictures directly. More pictures here

Click on the small image to view a larger version New Post-blast Satellite Imagery from DigitalGlobe Pre-explosion overview of the area of devastion(Source: DigitalGlobe 13 May 2003) Overview of the area of devastion (Source: DigitalGlobe 27 April 2004) Comparative overview of the blast-affected town of Ryongchon Approximate location of the explosion(Source: DigitalGlobe 13 May 2003) Approximate location of the explosion, post-blast The explosion's crater appears to have been partially filled in(Source: DigitalGlobe 27 April 2004) Comparative overview of the approximate location of the explosion in the town of Ryongchon The Ryongchon Primary School, pre-explosion(Source: DigitalGlobe 13 May 2003) The...

<p>DANDONG, China -- Aid workers allowed into secretive North Korea on Saturday described a ring of devastation around last week's massive train explosion and said 76 of the 154 people confirmed dead were children in a school destroyed by the blast.</p>

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) made an erroneous reporting over the train explosion in North Korea by posting an incorrect satellite photo showing huge clouds of black smoke billowing from the alleged blast site on its Website. The BBC explained Friday that the photo was taken 18 hours after the explosion in the northwest North Korean town of Ryongchon, but the black-and-white satellite image was later found to be taken after an air raid in Iraq. Due to the superb timing of the mistaken photo Web-posting, many newspapers, including The Korea Times, printed the same photo in error in their...