Nabbed N Koreans entered Thailand via Mekong river

BANGKOK, Nov 29 (Reuters) Fifty-nine North Korean refugees arrested in Bangkok this week fled to Thailand via China and the Mekong River, police said today, confirming the route as a major ''underground railway'' out of the isolated communist state.

Some of the refugees, the third mass arrest of North Koreans in Bangkok in four months, had worked briefly in China to finance their journey on to Thailand, Police Colonel Savarut Praiwan told Reuters.

The group, which included nine children, had no travel documents and had been been staying at a house in a posh northern Bangkok suburb for two weeks before their arrest yesterday evening for illegal entry.

''They said they had no travel documents and were working on papers to travel to South Korea,'' Saravut said.

A spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the group should leave for South Korea once they had been through the Thai immigration and judicial process.

Saravut said police planned to charge them today with with illegal entry.

Previously, the courts in Thailand, which has never sent North Koreans home, have handed down suspended sentences, allowing refugee agencies to arrange quietly for them to go on to South Korea.

Almost 300 North Koreans picked up in police raids in August and October were convicted of illegal entry and detained until arrangements were made to send them on to Seoul.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the house where the latest group of refugees was arrested belonged to a religious group trying to get refugees out of North Korea, but Saravut said it was rented by a South Korean businessman.

About 5,000 North Koreans have fled to the South since the Korean War ended in 1953. More than 100,000 are believed to be living in hiding in China, waiting for a chance to go, Yonhap said, citing human rights activists operating in China.

According to Seoul's Unification Ministry, 1,054 North Koreans made it to the South in the first seven months of 2006 -- an increase of nearly 60 percent over the same period in 2005.

REUTERS AKJ KP1042