Twenty men, women and children claiming to be North Koreans broke into the South Korean consulate in Beijing on Friday seeking asylum, a diplomatic source said. South Korean YTN television showed footage of the group clawing through a barbed-wire fence and scaling a wall to enter the compound in a leafy diplomatic area at dawn. The group included four children and was made up of 14 women and six men, the source said. Consulate officials were not immediately available for comment.
| I hope they were too busy serving food and drinks. |
Last month, 44 North Korean asylum seekers used makeshift ladders to scale the fence and leap into the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Hundreds of asylum seekers from reclusive North Korea have broken into foreign embassies and consulates in China since 2002, hoping to secure passage to wealthier South Korea, but usually in smaller groups. Sources in Beijing's diplomatic community say South Korea's consulate is a common target, and most of the asylum seekers enter on the basis of fake documents rather than breaking in. At any time there are as many as 100 holed up in the compound in Beijing's leafy diplomatic district, sometimes for weeks as they await passage to the South via a third country, they say. Two sections of an inner wire fence at the South Korean diplomatic mission had been snipped away but it was unclear how the outer fence was breached. At 8.30 a.m., two police cars were outside the compound and officers were taking notes. |