According to Yonhap:
Ten North Korean workers presumably died and about 40 others were injured last week when two buses carrying them collided with each other at the communist state’s border industrial complex joint run by South Korean firms, officials here said Wednesday.
The collision took place Friday evening at an intersection at the Kaesong industrial park where about 120 South Korean firms employ 42,000 North Koreans to produce labor-intensive goods.
Citing South Korean witnesses, police in the South Korean border city of Paju said that a commuter bus hit another on the side amid heavy rains but no South Koreans were aboard the buses.
“The case was reported by South Korean workers traveling to and from the Kaesong complex,” a police official said, declining to be identified. “The exact number of casualties and how the accident happened have not been ascertained.”
An official at the Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean matters, said North Korean authorities blockaded the area after the collision, making it difficult to determine casualties.
“The North would not let us know about the accident,” he said, also declining to be identified.
The factory park is the last remaining symbol of reconciliation between the two Koreas, which remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty.
Its fate has increasingly hung in the balance this year as tensions rise along the inter-Korean border over the deadly March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship off the west coast.
Read the full story here:
10 N. Koreans presumed killed in bus collision at joint factory park with S. Korea
Yonhap
7/7/2010
