While Families Mourn, Strangers Speculate in More Than 50 Dead in Fire in S. Korea
INCHON, South Korea (Oct. 30) - Fire swept through a three-story building crowded with weekend diners and drinkers in a South Korean port city on Saturday, killing more than 50 people, many of them teen-agers.
Some 70 people were also injured in the blaze, which broke out in the early evening in Inchon, South Korea's second largest city, 30 miles west of Seoul, authorities said.
'I heard a blast and then saw smoke filling up the building and people scrambling out,' Park Hyun-sok, a witness, said on the cable network YTN.
Most of the victims were trapped inside the second-floor beer bar and a billiard parlor on the third floor, police said. The victims were mostly high school students who were out enjoying themselves after school festivals.
'All windows facing the street in the beer bar were blocked, forcing those inside to try to flee through the only door leading to the narrow corridor,' said witness Kim Jun-kyu, 58.
The building, located in an entertainment district in the city center, was about 20 years old and lacked basic fire prevention facilities such as sprinklers, state-run KBS-TV reported. Many disasters in South Korea have been blamed on lax safety regulations.
Police tentatively put the casualty figure at 54 killed and 71 injured. The death toll could rise, because some of the injured were in critical condition, they said.
The fire started in a karaoke salon in the basement and spread rapidly upward, police said, quoting witnesses. Everyone in a ground-floor restaurant managed to escape but more than 120 people in upper floors were trapped, they said.
TV footage showed firefighters carrying injured people on the back and racing to nearby hospitals.
'The fire spread so quickly that by the time we got into the beer bar, we found many people already dead. They appeared to have suffocated from the smoke,' said local police chief Park Myong-hwan.
The cause of the fire was unknown.
YTN reported that workers had been renovating the basement karaoke salon, where the fire started, and were using paint thinners.
The flames raced quickly upward through a narrow corridor, burning plastic furniture and floor carpets. Toxic gas quickly filled the building, and most of the windows were blocked, police said.
Fire engines rushed to the scene and extinguished the fire in 40 minutes, police said.
'There were so many people carried out of the building, but there were not enough ambulances and so firefighters left them on the pavement and rushed back inside to get more people out,' witness Woo Sung-hwan, 43, was quoted as saying by the national news agency Yonhap.
Dozens of family members were wailing and praying outside the intensive care unit of the city's Inha University Hospital, where many victims were hospitalized, according to TV footage.
Running short of beds, doctors and nurses laid some of the bodies on the floor covered with white sheets.
Saturday's fire is the worst since a hotel fire killed 88 people in Seoul in 1974. Three years before that, another hotel fired killed 165 people in Seoul in 1971.
Just four months ago this year, 19 kindergarten children and four adults were killed in a fire that gutted a dormitory at a seaside summer camp in western South Korea.
But those worlds may have collided violently. One focus of the investigation is their business dealings, including the possibility that these people recently became involved in a bitter battle over the stock of a small company called C3D Inc., whose partisans and detractors have been slugging it out on the Internet. The fledgling company says it has an innovative new computer technology, to be demonstrated soon, but its most salient feature is a stock price that has zoomed from $1.75 in April to more than $22 Friday.
Traders who were betting that the price would fall say that they have told investigators that these people was helping them, and that they feared that these people had been killed because of that help. Law enforcement officials and stock regulators must determine whether this is a hot tip or the kind of paranoid fantasy not unknown in the no-holds-barred world of the small, risky securities known as penny stocks.
There could also be a money motive for the speculation. Any public mention of such a small company, pro or con, can have a huge effect on the price of its stock, and both company boosters and critics may have a lot of money at stake. On each of four days last week, more than 100,000 shares of C3D changed hands, most at prices above $20.
C3D officials said they had never eheard of these people "teey may have ben doing penny stock -- and our company is one that is a hot company," said Eugene Levich, the chief executive of C3D
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