Hope fades for victims of Seoul shop disaster

RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

Tokyo

Several dozen people were still believed to be alive last night under the rubble of the Sampoong department store in Seoul, but hope was fading that they could be rescued before they succumbed to hunger, thirst and asphyxiation.

Rescuers continued searching all weekend through the mangled debris of the five-floor shopping centre which collapsed on Thursday evening in the South Korean capital, but at least 200 people are still unaccounted for. The body countstands at 113, with nearly a thousand people injured. Korea Telecom transmitted signals every half-hour designed to trigger cellular phones or pagers which trapped survivors might have been carrying. "Rescue efforts will continue until the last surviving person is saved," said Cho Soon, the mayor of Seoul, who was elected last week, two days before the disaster.

One woman was rescued yesterday: Lee Un Young, a 21-year-old check-out clerk, died in hospital shortly after her arrival.

Ms Lee was the first person rescued since Saturday, when 24 cleaners were carried, one by one, along a 130ft (40 metre) tunnel dug through the rubble into a sub-basement. The 10 men and 14 women were ending their shift when the building collapsed, trapping them in total darkness in a small pocket of air.

The son of one of the cleaners discovered they were alive after tapping on a wall near the basement. They were pulled to safety through a tunnel which was no more than 16 inches (40 cm) high in places.

"We held hands and encouraged each other not to lose hope," said Han Kyung Sok, 53, afterwards. "I desperately wanted to live, even though I felt so miserable and dreadful."

"I hadn't drunk a drop of water," said Lim Choon Hwa, 64, from hospital. "Some of the others quenched their thirst with their own urine, but I was so exhausted I couldn't even do that.''

Lee Jun, the retired general who owns the Sampoong store, was arrested over the weekend, with his son and two other executives, on charges of manslaughter and violating construction safety regulations. The four are said to have known the building's dire state and to have called in safety inspection teams hours before the disaster. The gas supply had been switched off, but no steps were taken to warn staff or to evacuate the store.

The five-floor building, in an affluent residential district of Seoul, was originally designed on four storeys, but the management redesigned it to add a top floor with a swimming pool. At the time of the collapse the fifth floor was burdened with heavy items such as refrigerators, in a summer sale. The basement car park had been illegally enlarged, prosecutors alleged, and the ground on which the building stood, a land-fill rubbish dump, was insufficiently consolidated.

On Saturday, President Kim Young Sam paid a brief visit to the rescue site. His party's defeat in last week's local elections was partly attributed to public anger at a series of earlier disasters, and Korean newspapers and politicians have renewed their criticism of Mr Kim. "Korean people are now living in a shoddy republic where they do not know when they could face an accident due to the lack of crisis-management capability of the Kim administration," a spokesman for the opposition Democratic Party said.

James Fenton, page 15