N. Korea bans mobile phones for citizens

Seoul - North Korea has banned citizens from using mobile phones since late May, an official of the communist state said Thursday, about a year and a half after it introduced the service to the nation.

The reason for the ban was unknown.

"It is true that mobile phone use was banned around May 25," said a North Korean official attending economic talks with the South in the North's capital Pyongyang, according to a South Korean pool report from the talks. The official declined to elaborate, the report said.

No one on the streets of Pyongyang was seen using mobile phones and officials and foreign travel agents were lining up at hotels to use public pay phones, the report said.

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper has said the ban of mobile phones might have been imposed after the North's security service decided that a deadly train blast in the town of Ryongchon in April was triggered by mobile phones in a botched attempt to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Mobile phone was introduced in North Korea in November 2002, and the number of users increased to more than 20,000 by 2003, the Chosun Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper published in Japan, said on its Web site.

Three quarters of South Korean's 48 million people carry at least one mobile phone in comparison. -- Reuters

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