S. Korean Subway Victims Died Trapped in an Inferno

As the death toll from a deadly subway inferno in South Korea’s third-largest city climbed Tuesday to more than 120, investigators questioned how a blaze started by a disturbed arsonist could have killed so many people so quickly.

The subway trains in the city of Taegu had no sprinklers, and fixtures were made of flammable material. Doors slammed shut soon after the fire erupted, and emergency lights quickly failed. Plunged into darkness, trapped passengers were unable to find escape routes and rescue workers were unable to find the frantic victims.

Witnesses said the nightmare began when a man in his 50s, who authorities say has a history of mental illness, poured a container of paint thinner onto the floor of his subway car, then ignited it with a cigarette lighter before other passengers could tackle him.

Within seconds, the flames engulfed all six cars of the subway train -- and then leaped across the platform to six more cars of a train that was arriving from the opposite direction. More than 1,000 people were in the trains and the station when the fire broke out at the end of the morning rush hour.

In a phenomenon with echoes of the Sept. 11 attacks, trapped passengers in one of the most mobile telephone-obsessed countries in the world called their relatives to assure them that they were safe, only minutes before they succumbed to the fire.

“ ‘Mom, there is a fire in the subway and I can’t breathe,’ ” one tearful mother, Jang Gae Sun, recounted her 20-year-old daughter saying in their last conversation. “I called her name three times and urged her to pull herself together, but she hung up the phone, saying she couldn’t talk anymore because it was too hard to breathe. The last thing she said to me was, ‘I love you, Mother.’ ”

The heat was so intense that the subway was transformed into an underground incinerator, with fixtures of the trains simply melting away. Many of the victims were nearly obliterated. As of early this morning, officials had positively identified only 52 victims and said they would need to use DNA testing to give an exact determination of the number and identities of the dead.

“We still cannot offer an exact death toll because many bodies were severely torn apart and scorched,” police Lt. Kum Sun Hui told reporters.

Taegu Mayor Cho Hae Nyong told reporters this morning that 124 people had been confirmed dead. Dozens were reported missing.

The suspect, who was identified as Kim Dae Han, 56, was a truck driver who suffered a stroke in 2001 and has a history of mental illness. South Korean media reported that he had threatened in the past to burn down a hospital, blaming poor treatment for partial paralysis he sustained after the stroke. On the subway, he attracted the attention of other passengers by repeatedly flicking his cigarette lighter.

“When the train arrived at the station, the man took out a plastic container that looked like a water bottle and tried to light it with the lighter,” Park Geum Tae, who sat next to Kim, told reporters. “I and other passengers protested and tried to stop him, but he threw the bag onto the floor and fire spread. In the process, he himself was engulfed by the flame. We put out the flames on him with our clothes, and then all hell broke out at once.”

Kim survived the fire with only minor burns and smoke inhalation and was identified about two hours afterward by witnesses in a Taegu hospital and arrested.

“He has been just rambling on for hours, and we could hardly understand what he was saying. We guess he was suffering from deep depression,” an investigator, Chung Suk Ho, told the Korea Herald paper.

The fire in Taegu, 150 miles south of Seoul, ranks as one of the worst subway disasters in history and is certain to raise questions about subway safety.

Compounding the lack of sprinklers, the fixtures of the sleek-looking, modern subway -- seats, ceiling and flooring -- were made out of synthetic materials that caught fire quickly and produced billowing clouds of highly toxic fumes that disabled both passengers and rescue workers.

“If you inhale just once that toxic gas, you stop breathing,” said Kwan Young Chol, a Taegu firefighter, told South Korean reporters.

The subway system in Taegu has been beset by accidents since construction began in 1991. The most serious occurred in 1995, when a gas explosion at a subway construction site killed 101 people.