Back in September, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test, which was said to have been its biggest so far. Subsequently, Kim Jong-un’s regime gleefully declared the test to be so successful that they would soon be able to sink Japan with a nuke and turn the U.S. to “ashes and darkness.” However, the test itself was so powerful that it actually reshaped a mountain. At the time, the underground blast sank an 85-acre area situated above the testing tunnels, and now, it appears that disaster later struck inside the tunnels themselves, killing at least 200 workers.
The incident reportedly took place on October 10, and English-language reports first arrived via The Telegraph, which translates from Japan’s Asahi TV network. Two separate collapses within the test-site tunnels — while workers worked to further extend them — apparently killed 100 workers apiece:
Sources in North Korea told the news channel that a tunnel being excavated by around 100 workers at the Punggye-ri test site collapsed earlier this month.
An additional 100 labourers sent to rescue their colleagues were reportedly killed when the tunnel suffered a second collapse.
Following North Korea’s six nuclear test, the damage to the mountain led Chinese scientists to warn that further testing “could blow the top off the mountain and leak radioactive waste.” And although such a prospect seems otherworldly at this point, this is a regime that’s proudly obsessed with attaching mini-nukes onto long range missiles, which they soon say will be able to reach any area in the United States. It’s safe to assume that they’re not exactly focused upon worker safety inside those test-site tunnels — hence the lack of publicity about an accident that occurred weeks ago.
(Via The Telegraph & USA Today)