6 S. Korea Riot Police Killed in Rescue Raid

Six South Korean police officers were killed early today when protesting students set fire to a campus building as riot police stormed it to free captured colleagues, a police spokesman said.

Reports from the scene at Dongui University in Pusan, the major port about 200 miles southeast of Seoul, said the death toll could rise. The police spokesman said 15 officers and at least one student were in a hospital.

The police spokesman said most of the victims died from smoke inhalation. Some of the injured suffered burns or hurt themselves leaping from the nine-story building.

The drama began when radical students captured five plainclothes officers Tuesday evening during an off-campus demonstration called to protest the action of police in firing more than 20 warning shots the previous night to beat back a radical student attack on a police post.

Police officials negotiated unsuccessfully through the night for the hostages’ release, and authorities then ordered a raid.

About 700 police launched the campus assault shortly before dawn today to free their colleagues, who were being held blindfolded on the seventh floor of the library building.

As they rushed up the stairs, students splashed gasoline over barricades they had set up earlier to block doorways and fled to the roof with the hostages. When police reached the seventh floor, students set the barricades alight with gasoline bombs.

The domestic Yonhap News Agency said that several officers, after suffering burns, dropped to their deaths after hanging briefly from a window ledge. Other reports said the victims leaped from the windows.

A total of 88 students were arrested at the school, a police spokesman said. The university administration immediately canceled classes and barred students from entering the campus. All of the hostages were later freed when professors intervened and persuaded the students to let them go, officials said.

It was by far the deadliest incident in recent years in a country that has become used to almost daily violence on campuses and in strike-bound factories. National police headquarters in Seoul said it was the worst loss of police life in years.

South Korea has been hit by a wave of violent protests in recent weeks by radical students and dissidents demanding the overthrow of President Roh Tae Woo’s government. But protests rarely result in deaths in South Korea despite the fury of street clashes in which protesters battle riot police with firebombs and rocks. Riot police are normally armed only with tear gas and batons.

Today’s heavy toll on a police force already stretched nearly to the breaking point by continuous riot duty seemed certain to strengthen the hand of rightists in President Roh’s administration who have been calling for all-out war on leftists.