Arsonist Kills 35 on S Korea Tube

At least 35 people were killed today, with many more missing, in a suspected arson attack on an underground train in South Korea's third largest city.

The blaze started on the Daegu metro when a man set fire to a milk carton filled with flammable material, police said. A suspect was being questioned but officers have not determined a motive for the attack.

South Korean media reports said as many as 100 people could be dead. A reporter for MBC-TV said that one of its reporters went to the burned carriages with a gas mask and saw "dozens" of charred bodies.

One witness detailed the terrifying scene as the fire ignited: "The man kept flickering a lighter and an old man told him to stop. The man dropped the lighter and the train caught fire," an unidentified male survivor told YTN News.

"Several young men seized him, but the fire spread and black smoke rose. Then everyone rushed out."

Kang Yeon-ju, 21, one of the passengers who is still missing, telephoned her mother in a panic when the fire began.

"She only said that there was a fire and the train door wasn't opening, so I told her to just break open a window and get out," said Kim Bok-sun, 45.

Ms Kim called her daughter back a few minutes later but no one answered the phone.

Firefighters said 87 people were missing with toxic fumes impeding rescue operations.

Police are interrogating Kim Dae-han, 46, who witnesses said carried a milk carton filled with flammable material into a carriage.

"When the man tried to use a cigarette lighter to light the box, some passengers tied to stop him. Apparently a scuffle erupted and the box exploded into flames," a police spokesman said.

YTN News aired footage of the frantic scene inside a nearby hospital reportedly showing the suspect being attended to by nurses. The man sat frowning on a bed wearing what appeared to be a hospital smock, his face and hands smudged from soot from the fire.

Yu Heung-soo, a police sergeant in Daegu, said Mr Kim had been burned on both legs and the right wrist, but YTN quoted a doctor as saying that his only injury was toxic gas and smoke inhalation.

YTN News, without citing sources, also reported that the suspect worked as truck driver and had once threatened to burn down the hospital where he had received unsatisfactory treatment.

Fire department officials said some 3,200 people, including 1,000 firefighters and a large number of police officers, had been mobilised to rescue victims.

In the minutes after the fire began, thick black smoke billowed out of the ventilator shafts. City centre traffic came to a standstill as ambulances rushed to the scene. Firefighters in orange suits and oxygen tanks rushed into the subway.

Rescuers brought victims, their faces and clothes black with soot, up to the street in stretchers and slid them into ambulances.

Daegu, one of the 10 World Cup soccer venues last year, is the third largest city in South Korea with a population of 2.5m.

In 1995, a gas explosion in an underground railway construction site in the city killed 101 people and injured 143 others.

In South Korea's last major fire disaster, 55 people were killed in a beer hall in Incheon, near Seoul, in October.