INCHEON, South Korea — Rescuers found the burned bodies Wednesday of two islanders killed in a North Korean attack, casualties of the artillery exchange a day earlier between North and South Korean militaries.
Today, South Korea’s government held an emergency meeting on fallout from North Korea’s artillery attack as Washington and Seoul prepared for joint drills involving a U.S. nuclear-powered supercarrier.
North Korea warned today of more “retaliation” if South Korea carries out “reckless military provocations.”
The U.S. sent the aircraft carrier USS George Washington for the military exercises off the Korean Peninsula in a show of strength, and the U.S. administration pressed China to use its influence on Kim Jong Il’s government in Pyongyang to ease tension in the region.
As they left behind gutted homes, scorched trees and rubble-strewn streets, resi-dents of the tiny South Korean island shelled by North Korea told harrowing tales Wednesday of fiery destruction and narrow escapes.
Ann Ahe-ja, one of hundreds of exhausted evacuees from Yeonpyeong island arriving in the port of Incheon on a rescue ship, said Tuesday’s artillery barrage that killed four people - two of them civilians - had caught her by surprise.
“Over my head, a pine tree was broken and burning,” Ann said. “So I thought, ‘Oh, this is not another exercise. It is a war.’ I decided to run. And I did.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the shelling of the island near the two nations’ disputed maritime border one of the “gravest incidents” since the Korean War.
South Korean troops remained on high alert. In Washington, President Barack Obama pledged to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Seoul and called upon China to restrain its ally, North Korea.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak held a special meeting of top officials to discuss security and economic impacts of the attack, a presidential official said.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Chinese leadership “is absolutely critical” in dealing with North Korea.
North Korea’s action “is also tied, we think, to the succession of this young 27-year old who’s going to take over at some point in the future,” Mullen said in an interview on the ABC program The View, referring to the North Korean leader’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un.
The U.S. has more than 28,000 troops in South Korea to guard against North Korean aggression, a legacy of the three-year conflict that ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953.
About 10 homes took direct hits and 30 were destroyed in the midafternoon barrage, according to a local official who spoke by telephone from the island, just seven miles from the North Korean shore. About 1,700 civilians live on Yeonpyeong alongside South Korean troops stationed there.
“I heard the sound of artillery, and I felt that something was flying over my head,” said Lim Jung-eun, 36, who fled the island with three children, including a 9-month old strapped to her back. “Then the mountain caught on fire.”
Many of those evacuated from Yeonpyeong had spent the night in underground shelters and embraced tearful family members on arrival in Incheon.
The shower of artillery from North Korea was the first to strike a civilian population. In addition to the two marines killed, the bodies of two men, believed in their 60s, were pulled from a destroyed construction site, the coast guard said. At least 18 people, most of them troops, were injured.
Officials in Seoul said there could be considerable North Korean casualties. North Korea’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper published a military statement accusing South Korea of triggering the exchange, but did not mention any casualties.
The skirmish began after North Korea warned the South to stop carrying out military drills near their sea border, South Korean officials said.
When Seoul refused and fired artillery into disputed waters - away from the North Korean shore - theNorth responded by shelling Yeonpyeong.
Seoul responded by unleashing its own barrage of howitzers and scrambling its fighter jets.
North Korea, laying out its version of events, said the army warned the South several times that firing “a single shell” in its waters would draw a “prompt retaliatory strike.” A military official phoned a South Korean counterpart at 8 a.m. to urge Seoul to cancel the drills, the North’s news agency KCNA reported.
But the South Koreans - displaying their “crafty and vicious nature” - went ahead and fired dozens of shells some five hours later, prompting a defensive response, the report said.
Island resident Cha Taejung said a shell fell just 50 yards behind him.
“I was going to turn around, but I didn’t because I was reaching out for something in front of me instead, and at that moment, the bomb dropped,” Cha told YTN television.
“I think I’m alive because I did not turn around,” he told the South Korean broadcaster, his voice turning emotional. “Words cannot describe what happened.”
The Obama administration urged China to press North Korea to halt provocative action, saying Beijing has a duty to tell Pyongyang that deliberate acts “specifically intended to inflame tensions in the region” are not acceptable.
China said late Wednesday that it was “highly concerned” about the artillery exchange and urged restraint.
China “feels pain and regret about an incident causing deaths and property losses and is worried about the developments,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement. “We have always maintained that the relevant parties should, through dialogue and consultation, resolve disputes by peaceful means.”
Diplomats for countries on the U.N. Security Council said there had been no request for the 15-member council to hold a full, formal meeting about the shelling but some informal bilateral talks were being held among some members.
A spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday night that troops acted defensively in response to “extremely reckless military provocation,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
In Pyongyang, residents boasted that the exchange showed off their military’s strength and ability to counter South Korean aggression.
“I think this time our military demonstrated to the whole world that it doesn’t make empty talk,” Ri Pong Suk said in the North Korean capital.
Artillery and gunfire break out sporadically along the land and maritime borders dividing the two Koreas, and have brought deadly exchanges four times since 1999.
In March, North Korea was accused of sinking a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang has denied responsibility.
South Koreans see Tuesday’s killing of civilians as taking the confrontation to a new level, one analyst said.
“It’s clearly a line for people, and crossing that line puts it in a different category,” said John Delury, an assistant professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies. “People here are feeling very conflicted, outrage and sorrow.”
On Yeonpyeong island, famous for its crabs, video from YTN showed burned out buildings still smoldering and huge craters from the shelling,
Chung Doo-sun, who lives in the nearby city of Gimpo, said his daughter lives on the island and “was crying and told me the windows of her home were all shattered.”
Seoul, the South Korean capital of more than 10 million people, was calm, although the skirmish weighed on people’s minds.
“I never felt anxious in the past, even after the Cheonan warship incident,” said Lee Ho-chul, 30. “But it feels different this time since civilians were hurt.”
Kim Chung-gil, 40, defected from North Korea six years ago and said the attack was the North “throwing a tantrum” over South Korean military exercises off the North Korean coast.
“Even if they were retaliating, like they said, against South Korean drills, they shouldn’t have attacked civilians,” he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Hyung-Jin Kim, Kwang-tae Kim, Ian Mader, Foster Klug, Cara Anna, Anita Snow and Anne Gearan of The Associated Press, by Mark McDonald of The New York Times, by Bomi Lim, Nicholas Johnston, Hans Nichols, Julianna Goldman, Nicole Gaouette, Tony Capaccio, Frances Yoon, Steve McPherson, Keiko Ujikane, Takashi Hirokawa, Yuki Yamaguchi, Alan Crawford, Patrick Donahue, Robert Hutton and Michael Forsythe of Bloomberg News and by Victoria Kim of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/25/2010