South Korean warship 'may have hit old mine'

(AFP)

The South Korean Navy searches for possible survivors

The explosion which split in two a South Korean naval ship may have been caused by a sixty-year old sea mine, the country’s defence minister said yesterday, as rescuers spent a fourth day searching for the 46 missing sailors believed to have gone down with the vessel close to the disputed border with North Korea.

The Seoul government has not directly blamed North Korea for the mysterious explosion on the Cheonan, a 1200 ton corvette which sank off Baengnyeong Island, as it patrolled in the Yellow Sea late on Friday night. But the defence minister, Kim Tae Young, said yesterday that it could have been caused by one of thousands of Soviet maritime mines set by the North during the 1950-53 Korean War.

“Though many mines were removed, it must have been impossible to retrieve them all,” Mr Kim said. “Or we have to see whether North Korea has intentionally set a mine adrift.” But he did not rule out the possibility of an accident involving the torpedoes, missiles and depth charges with which the Cheonan was armed.

Twenty South Korean ships, and one from the United States navy, continued to search yesterday for the missing sailors. Divers who banged on the submerged hull of one half of the vessel heard no answering reply.

The state media of North Korea has made no comment on the disaster, but in a separate statement yesterday it threatened “unpredictable incidents” if the South continues to take tourists and journalists into the demilitarised zone dividing the two countries.

The ship’s captain, Choi Won-il, who joined the search for survivors after being rescued, described the moment the ship went down. He said: “There was the sound of an explosion and the ship keeled to the right. We lost power and telecommunications.

“I was trapped in the cabin for five minutes before my colleagues broke the window in and let me out. When I got out, the stern had disappeared.”

The Cheonan had been on routine patrol near Baengnyeong, a heavily garrisoned outpost that lies off the North Korean coast. The maritime boundary has been disputed since the ceasefire that ended fighting in the Korean war in 1953.

Residents of a nearby island, well used to naval and artillery exercises by the rival nations, said they heard an unusually intense burst of naval gunfire for 15 minutes around the time that the ship began to founder after an explosion in its stern.

But sensitive surveillance and satellite data showed there were no North Korean units in the area, leading to speculation that the ship had hit a mine. The defence ministry later said a ship fired at a radar contact that turned out to be birds.