North Korea has celebrated the beginning of a scheme to build 10,000 flats with a huge explosion, detonated by Kim Jong-un, the country’s supreme leader.
The ‘groundblasting’ was held on Sunday, which was the birthday of Kim Jong Il, the leader’s father – officially known as “the Day of the Shining Star”. It took place in the recently formed Hwasong district on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
The scheme will be the fourth and final phase of a mass-housing programme that will add 50,000 homes to North Korea’s housing stock.
In his speech to the crowd, Kim said: “With the 10,000-household construction project of this year, the construction of 50,000 houses in Pyongyang City, which has been vigorously implemented since the Party Congress, has finally entered the final stage of completion.”
- Watch the ‘groundlasting’ ceremony:
Hwasong was created in the northeast of the capital, close to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in 2022. It now contains a number of high-rise buildings.
After the ceremony, Kim visited the Kumsusan Palace for the first time in four years. It houses the embalmed bodies of his father and grandfather, which are preserved in glass sarcophagi.
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