The newspaper quotes Seoul's intelligence sources as saying that the blast presumably occurred at a military factory or at a military depot located at an altitude of up to 1,500 meters above the sea level. There are few civilian settlements in that mountainous region, the newspaper also reports.
On Sunday media reports appeared that on September 9 - the day when the People's Democratic Republic of Korea was founded - spy satellites registered a mushroom cloud of about 3,500 meters in diameter and up to 1,000 meters in height in around 20 kilometers from the border between north Korea and China.
The mushroom overlooked the Kim Hyong-jik County named after grandfather of incumbent Kim Jong-il. According to the newspaper, the explosion occurred only 10 kilometers away from a place the U.S. intelligence claimed to be a possible missile base as far back as in 1999. Allegedly, there could have been up to ten Rodong 1 ballistic missiles there.
At the same time, Chosun Ilbo remarks, a railway accident like that of Ryongchon, province of North Pyongan, that claimed 160 lives. According to the newspaper, this time it could be an explosion of railway carriages with rocket fuel or chemicals.
North Korea is still silent on what has happened. Usually emergencies in the country are either nor reported at all or only after clearing all the circumstances.
