SEOUL — North Korea yesterday lauded the “heroic deaths” of four persons killed after running into collapsing or burning buildings after last week’s deadly train explosion to retrieve portraits of leader Kim Jong Il and his late father Kim Il Sung.
The leaders are objects of a pervasive personality cult in the communist North, with father-and-son portraits hanging in every home and building.
“The Korean people’s spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives was fully displayed,” the North’s official KCNA news agency said, adding that teacher Han Jong Suk, 56, “breathed her last with portraits in her bosom.”
The report came as a South Korean ship brimming with instant noodles, blankets and bottled water sailed for North Korea, part of an international effort to help the thousands injured or left homeless in the explosion.
Seoul also moved closer to approving a North Korean plea for millions of dollars in additional aid, including 50 television sets. The request came a day after North Korea rejected Seoul’s offer to send doctors, saying it already had enough medical help.
Later yesterday, a report by Japan’s Kyodo news agency said the first round of six-country talks at the working level on North Korea’s nuclear programs will take place in Beijing on May 12.
Kyodo gave no other details.
The six countries — China, Russia, the two Koreas, the United States and Japan — have held two inconclusive rounds of senior-level talks on the North’s nuclear programs.
The death toll from last Thursday’s train blast in Ryongchon stood at 161, with 370 victims still hospitalized — including about 250 children. Many sustained severe burns and eye injuries from the blast.
About 20,000 rescuers were on the scene, KCNA said.
The North’s rejection of Seoul’s offer to truck supplies overland, across the heavily fortified zone separating the rivals, riled some south of the border. The refusal meant that supplies that could have been sent in the same day would arrive by ship late today at the earliest, a week after the disaster.
Pyongyang’s insistence that it already had enough doctors also generated an incredulous response.
“Given the reality in the North, who would believe that?” the JoongAng Ilbo daily said yesterday in an editorial. “North Korea needs to learn how to accept a genuine offer of help for what it is.”
Hospitals lack basic supplies, such as intravenous drips needed to treat burn patients. The World Health Organization listed antibiotics, eye drops and burn kits as the greatest needs.
Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in the North before communist authorities expelled him in late 2000, said doctors there use ordinary razor blades for surgery and empty beer bottles for intravenous drips.
“North Korea blocks trucks with South Korean aid at the inner Korean border while desperate children die,” he said.
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