3 Arrested in Connection With S. Korean Blast

Three employees of a small engineering firm were arrested Saturday on suspicion of rupturing a gas main shortly before a blast devastated a swath of the city, police said.

They said the construction crew apparently punched a hole in both the gas line and a sewer pipe during work at a department store. The gas then leaked into the water main and collected at a nearby subway construction site until a spark ignited it Friday.

About half the 98 people killed were children on their way to school. At least 125 people were hospitalized.

On Saturday, grief gave rise to anger in this city of 2.2 million, South Korea’s third largest, about 140 miles south of Seoul.

About 60 distraught relatives of victims besieged a local council office that had been hastily converted into an emergency center, accusing ashen-faced officials of neglect and of leaving corpses from the blast to rot in city morgues.

“Dozens of bodies are rotting at the hospitals because they don’t know what to do with them,” a weeping parent said.

Screaming, some of the demonstrators beat their fists on the bare linoleum floor, while others threw chairs, pens and papers at the government employees.

Taegu Mayor Lee Jong Ju spoke to the families later and said loved ones of each victim will get a preliminary compensation payment of $5,250 to help with funeral expenses.

A grim-faced President Kim Young Sam, reeling from yet another man-made disaster in his term of office, visited the scene of the blast and ordered a swift probe.

A spokesman for the subway construction company said its preliminary investigation showed the accident happened when a digger working at the shopping center project opened up a five-inch fracture in a gas main. A welding torch or a cigarette may have sparked the devastation, he said.

From around the country Saturday came accusations of a general disregard for safety in the construction industry. Newspapers devoted pages to the issue. One headline equated construction to “shoveling in a mine field.”