Song Il Guk - Carrying the Torch

I'm carrying a torch for Song Il Guk too. :) Look closely girls! You can see his wedding ring!

Olympic Torch Relay Completed Amid Protests
Sunday, April 27, 2008 20:29:46

The Olympic torch has completed the South Korean leg of its troubled worldwide relay amid isolated scuffles between pro-China and anti-China demonstrators.

Kim Jung-kil, chairman of the Korea Olympic Committee, got the relay off to a start on Sunday afternoon at Olympic Park in southeastern Seoul, the third in the capital's history. The relay began as Kim trotted through the World Peace Gate after a ceremony to mark the event. Around 80 runners carried the torch on a 24-kilometer course.

Eight-thousand police officers were mobilized backed up by helicopters, casting an extra-tight security net along the route of the relay.

Thousands of pro-Chinese demonstrators and hundreds of human rights activists who were protesting China's crackdown on pro-independence movement in Tibet briefly clashed near Olympic Park. But the two groups were separated by riot police.

The two sides shouted at earch other, throwing plastic bottles, wooden bars and rocks. A newspaper photographer was injured after being hit with a wooden bar and taken to a nearby hospital.

A North Korean defector was stopped by police while trying to disrupt the torch relay near Sincheon subway station at around three o'clock. Two members of a group working to improve the human rights situation in North Korea were apprehended in Yeoksam subway station in Gangnam while carrying thinner apparently to disrupt the torch relay.

Lit a month ago in Greece, the torch arrived in Seoul early Sunday. The torch will then be taken to North Korea for a relay in Pyongyang late Sunday night before going to China via Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Macau.

Reported by KBS WORLD Radio
Contact the KBS News: englishweb@kbs.co.kr