NORTH KOREA: Aid workers who visited the North Korean hospital where victims of Thursday's train explosion were taken, said the treatment was inadequate with basic equipment absent.
"We saw children rolling and moaning in pain, many with a lot of cuts to the face and rudimentary twine stitching," said World Food Programme (WFP) Regional Director for Asia Mr Tony Banbury.
Food, tents and medicine began to arrive in North Korea yesterday to help the town of Ryongchon recover after a devastating rail explosion that killed 161 people, nearly half of them schoolchildren, and destroyed thousands of homes.
"Some of the kids had lost sight in both eyes. Two were laid out on cabinets," he said.
The face of one 54-year-old woman was burnt practically beyond recognition, and she was in what appeared to be a comatose state, he said.
Many of the patients he saw had faces blackened by burns and lacerated by rubble and dust.
There was a lack of high-tech, modern medical equipment in the Sinuiju Provincial Hospital, which has electricity and scores of dedicated medical staff in uniform, Mr Banbury said.
Intravenous drips, a key way of feeding antibiotics and painkillers into seriously injured patients, were in scant supply.
"We have to get antibiotics to these people now," he said.
International aid workers who were allowed in to Ryongchon on Saturday described an apocalyptic scene, with massive craters, twisted rail tracks and blackened building, following the enormous explosion in the town near the Chinese border.
One aid worker said local residents, long primed by the communist government to expect invasion by the United States or South Korea, thought the huge explosion was a bomb to signal the start of a new Korean war.
"The explosion created a huge bang and a kind of a mushroom cloud." A local told me that his first thought was: "Now they have dropped the nuclear bomb."
"Apparently many felt the same way," said Kaija Rajahuhta, a Finnish Red Cross worker.
Photographs from Chinese state media and aid agencies showed North Koreans picking through buildings flattened in the blast, which showered debris for miles.
Others showed workers clearing the area with old-fashioned tractors. One showed two girls in red and blue tracksuits carting wood to rebuild their damaged house.
However, the 1,300 people that North Korean officials admitted were injured in the catastrophe, along with the bodies of the dead, had been evacuated before the international rescue workers ar- rived at the nearby city of Sinuiju.
North Korean officials blamed the disaster on human error. They said a train cargo of oil and chemicals ignited when workers knocked the wagons against power lines.
UN officials estimate that about 40 per cent of the town was damaged, including a three-storey primary school about 300 metres from the train station, where the roof was ripped away and the top floor collapsed.
Seventy-six of the victims were schoolchildren from the school. The aid workers' visit followed a rare invitation from the North's communist government, which relaxed its normally intense secrecy as it sought international help.
North Korea rarely reports on accidents and only belatedly sought aid after floods and a famine in the 1990s. Immediately after the explosion, Pyongyang cut telephone services to the area in what looked like an effort to prevent news getting out.
The UN said there would be "significant relief and rehabilitation requirements" in the coming weeks and months but praised Pyongyang for allowing access.
"Access to those in need has long been an issue in North Korea. Today's mission is a very encouraging example of prompt and open access", said Mr Masood Hyder, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in North Korea.
Additional reporting Reuters