An association of South Koreans living in northeast China has been contacted by a group of purported North Korean refugees asking for help, a report said Wednesday.
"We received four phone calls from December 19 to 21, with the callers claiming that they were part of some 30 to 40 people, many of them families, who recently fled the North," an unidentified official of the association in the city of Dalian was quoted as telling South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
"They were asking for help to contact the South Korean government," the official said.
There was no immediate comment from the South Korean foreign ministry.
The four phone calls, all made from public pay phones after 10:00 pm, were first made by a middle-aged man aged over 50 and later by women believed to be in their 30s or 40s, said the official.
"The callers all sounded very desperate and nervous," the official said.
The South Korean consulate in Shenyang is investigating the matter, Yonhap said.
Against a backdrop of food shortages and other hardships in the impoverished communist state, Seoul said last month that the number of refugees who have fled North Korea for the South had reached 20,000.
But it is rare for such a large group of refugees to seek asylum in the South.
Almost all North Korean refugees flee first to China, where they risk repatriation if caught. They try to seek refuge in a South Korean consulate, or move on to a third country from where they can travel to Seoul.
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