South Korea has mounted a huge land, sea and air operation to protect Asia-Pacific leaders, deploying over 37,000 personnel and enforcing draconian exclusion zones, officials said yesterday.
A spokesman for the port city of Busan, Steve Tang, said 37,000 officers from South Korea's national intelligence service, police, military, fire service, coast guard and customs were on high alert for the APEC meetings which opened yesterday.
The measures include a no-fly and no-vessel zone within a 7km radius from Nurimaru APEC house, a dome-shaped structure on Busan's coast where APEC leaders will be holding a retreat.
"It's not only the sky but the sea [that] will be guarded," Tang said.
The city's police, who have been on emergency duty since Oct. 19, have been deployed to subway stations to monitor suspicious activities, while garbage bins, potential hiding places for bombs, have been removed.
Body searches are being performed at airports, and at Busan Port's international passenger terminal and subways, while all cargo and mail is being X-rayed, a government statement said.
Coast guard patrol boats and hovercrafts are sweeping the city's coastline, while divers, bomb disposal experts and snipers are taking part in anti-terrorism exercises.
Delegates said nervousness about security had intensified since the hotel bombings in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday, which have been blamed on the al-Qaeda network.
As well as the threat of terrorist attack, the authorities here are also bracing for huge anti-globalization protests aimed to coincide with the APEC summit on Friday and Saturday which will be attended by US President George W. Bush.
More than 40,000 protesters marched against Bush at a summit of the Americas in Argentina last week. Violence erupted when several hundred demonstrators pelted police with rocks and Molotov cocktails.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
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