Seoul (AsiaNews) – Through its Embassy in Moscow South Korea's Foreign Ministry warned its citizens travelling or resident in Russia to be on their guard against possible attacks following the events in Beslan.

The threat to unwary South Koreans comes in the wake of an inaccurate statement by Russian State Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky who said that among the brutal bandits who killed hundreds of children and their parents in Beslan, North Ossetia, "there were Chechens, Ingush, Tatars, Kazakhs and Kareiski, i.e. Koreans.

In Russian Kareiski refers to ethnic Koreans who have lived in Russia for over three generations. They are descended from those Koreans who, towards the end of the Choson dynasty (1387-1910), went into exile to Russia. In 1937 Stalin forcibly removed them to Central Asia. Today, ethnic Koreans are thought to be around 470,000 and concentrated in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

"We're preparing proper measures to prevent possible attacks against our people there," Lee Yang-gu, director of the Russia-CIS division in South Korea's Foreign Ministry, told The Korean Times. (PC)