Sokor tanker blast kills 5; Nokor hand ruled out

SEOUL—A South Korean fuel tanker on Sunday sank after an explosion on board, leaving five crew members dead and six missing, the coast guard said. The 4,191-ton ship carrying 11 South Koreans and five Burma (Myanmar) citizens sank near Jawol island, about 32 kilometers off the western port of Incheon where the vessel had unloaded its cargo, a coast guard spokesperson told Agence France Presse. Yonhap news agency reported that the explosion was likely caused by gases leaking from the ship’s oil tanks, citing an official from the firm that owns the vessel. “We believe that something went wrong during the process to take out remaining gas in the oil tank,” the Doora Shipping official told the agency. “The vessel usually transports diesel, but this time it carried gasoline. We are now examining whether it had any relation to the explosion.” The dead crew members included one South Korean, two Burma (Myanmar) citizens and two others whose nationalities have not been identified yet after their bodies were recovered later from the sea. “The explosion took place far below the sea border with North Korea. We see very little possibility (of attacks by the North),” the spokesperson said. ASTANA, Kazakhstan—voters on Sunday headed to polling stations in large numbers in the oil-rich Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan in elections that look to have slightly broadened democratic representation in parliament’s rubber-stamp lower house. The high turnout, which reached 75 percent, is perhaps more an outcome of habit than hope, however, since the legislature will likely only undergo cosmetic changes. An exit poll by Kazakh think tank Institute of Democracy published late on Sunday showed three parties possibly entering parliament. According to data compiled from a survey of around 50,000 voters across the whole country, President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party easily pushed aside its competition with 81 percent of the vote. All the seats up for grabs in the 2007 election in the former Soviet nation’s parliament were won by Nur Otan.