North Koreans seen playing volleyball at a nuclear test site

PUNGGYE-RI: U.S. experts who have been forecasting an imminent North Korean nuclear test said on Tuesday they were surprised when they viewed their latest satellite images of the country’s nuclear test site and saw volleyball games under way.

With tension mounting between Pyongyang and Washington, analysts had thought they would see activity suggesting preparations for an underground explosion at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site and were not expecting what the photos, taken on 16 April by a commercial satellite, revealed. “We see that at three locations in the facility – in the main administrative area, at the support area, at the command centre and at the guard barracks near the command centre — they have volleyball games going on,” said Joe Bermudez, an expert with 38 North, an indepen- dent North Korea monitoring project based in Washington.

Bermudez offered two possible explanations — that the test site could be going into “a standby mode” or that the games were intended to confuse observers, given North Korea knows that Punggye-ri is under constant observation.

North Korea has conducted a series of ballistic missile launches in recent months in defiance of U.N. sanctions and concerns have been growing that it could soon conduct a sixth nuclear test after carrying out two last year. AGENCIES