| Forty-four North Korean men, women and children scaled the walls of the Canadian embassy in Beijing on Wednesday in a likely bid for political asylum, an embassy spokesman said. It was one of the largest groups ever to burst into a diplomatic compound in the Chinese capital in an attempt to escape their Stalinist home country. "It's a group of 44," said embassy spokesman Ian Burchett. "There are women, men and children among them. But we still don't know if the group is solely comprised of North Koreans." He said the people in the group had not yet made clear what they wanted, and that the embassy was in the process of communicating with them. Other embassy staff told AFP that they had been told they were North Koreans who had scaled the fence around the embassy early Wednesday afternoon. According to a Canadian foreign ministry spokeswoman in Montreal, one person was injured during the action. |