Clashes Continue as S. Korean Is Buried : Protests: Interment ends standoff between the parents of slain youth and radical students.

More than 40,000 South Korean students and workers crowded into a plaza in Kwangju late Sunday for disorderly, often violent, final rites for a student whose killing by police sparked weeks of protests.

The burial of Kang Kyung Dae, 20, ended nearly 24 hours of clashes with police and a standoff between his parents and radical students determined to use the body as a focus for their demonstrations.

“Now Kyung Dae will sleep comfortably,” his distraught father told the crowd in Kwangju’s city center before the coffin was taken to an outlying cemetery.

About 3,000 people were allowed into the cemetery. They sang anti-government songs as Kang, who was beaten to death by riot police in Seoul on April 26, was finally buried early today.

Students and workers had clashed with police all day. The disturbances began when Kang’s body arrived from Seoul and were renewed after a woman student who set herself on fire last month to protest his killing died at a hospital.

Students attacked police with steel bars, firebombs and rocks and were driven back with barrages of acrid, stinging tear gas.

Police said more than 200 people were injured in the violence in Kwangju, a provincial capital of 900,000 people. Eighteen riot police were disarmed and held by protesters on local campuses for four hours.

The semiofficial news agency Yonhap described the clashes as the worst this year in the city, a traditional center of dissent and the site of a 1980 uprising that the army suppressed at the cost of hundreds of lives.

Massed riot police initially refused to allow the cortege containing Kang’s body into Kwangju city center, insisting that it should go to the outlying cemetery.

After an 11-hour standoff, Kang’s family and funeral organizers agreed to go to the cemetery, only to be surrounded by thousands of students demanding that the body be brought to the city center.

The demonstrators prevailed in the end, and the cortege evaded police and moved into the city center plaza, where the funeral rites were held.