N. Korea: Several Hundred Dead

North Korean officials say several hundred people were believed killed in an explosion at a train station in the town of Ryongchon near the Chinese border, the British ambassador to North Korea said Friday.

The officials also told Ambassador David Slinn and other European envoys stationed in Pyongyang that several thousand people were believed injured and many might still be trapped in collapsed buildings nearby, a British Foreign Office spokesman said in London.

Earlier, a U.N. agency in Geneva said the secretive communist government had acknowledged at least 50 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in Thursday's blast. An aid worker says government officials told her that at least 150 people were killed.

Initial reports by South Korean media said 3,000 people were killed or hurt in the disaster at a railway station in Ryongchon, a bustling town about 90 miles north of Pyongyang.

Red Cross Spokesman John Sparrow said the death toll from Thursday's blast near the Chinese border could rise, reflecting the massive damage. The explosion destroyed 1,850 buildings and damaged another 6,350, he said, citing information from Red Cross officials in the North.

"When you look at the number of buildings destroyed, you have to be afraid of what you're going to find," Sparrow said. "We are anticipating that the casualty figures will increase."

The explosion leveled the train station, a school and apartments within a 500-yard radius, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, quoting Chinese witnesses. It said there were about 500 passengers and railway officials in the station at the time of the blast.

Ryongchon is the site of chemical and metalworking plants, and has a reported population of 130,000.

The British Broadcasting Corp. showed on its Web site what it said was a satellite photo taken 18 hours after the reported explosion. The black-and-white photo showed huge clouds of black smoke billowing from the site.

North Korea made a formal request to the United Nations for international help in the disaster. But North Korean media was largely silent about the accident. The government declared an emergency in the area while cutting off international telephone connections to prevent crash details from leaking out, Yonhap reported.

Reports on the cause of the blast have varied.

China's Xinhua News Agency, in a dispatch from Pyongyang, said the blast was blamed on ammonium nitrate — a chemical used in explosives and rocket fuel — leaking from one train. South Korea's unification minister said the trains were carrying fuel. Sparrow said the trains were carrying explosives similar to those used in mining.

Anne O'Mahony of the Irish aid agency Concern, speaking to RTE Irish radio by telephone from Pyongyang, said the North Korean government told her the explosion occurred when the dynamite-laden trains touched electric wires.

"What they've said is that two carriages of a train carrying dynamite — they were trying to disconnect the carriages and link them up to another train," she said. "They got caught in the overhead electric wiring, the dynamite exploded, and that was the cause of the explosion."

In Seoul, Unification Minister Jeong said China was urging North Korea to send the injured across the border to hospitals in China. But he said Pyongyang was instead asking China to dispatch relief workers to the scene.

There was no sign in Dandong, the Chinese border city nearest to the crash site, of injured people being brought out of North Korea. But the city's three biggest hospitals were preparing for a possible surge of patients. The city is about 12 miles from Ryongchon.

"We're ready to offer our close neighbor our best medical help anytime," said an official at Dandong Chinese Hospital.

Those injured "will be suffering greatly from … burns and those types of injuries that leave you traumatized," Sparrow said. He said Red Cross workers in the North were distributing tents and blankets to 4,000 families, while the international group was putting together hospital kits containing antibiotics, bandages and anesthetics.

The blast reportedly occurred nine hours after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il passed through the station on his way home from a three-day visit to China. But Jeong said that given the circumstances and the timing of the blast, "I don't think sabotage was involved."

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday, "We've seen some reports of a very large number of casualties from that; that, indeed, would be very sad, and obviously, we'd express our sympathy to whoever was hurt and how many people might be hurt. We don't know."