South Korea's Red Cross said it handed over the body of a North Korean woman on Friday to the North's authorities after it was found earlier this week in a border river swollen by rains.
The woman was believed to be in her late 40s, the Red Cross said in a statement. Her body, found amid debris on Tuesday in a South Korean river near the western Demilitarized Zone, was handed over to a North Korean checkpoint guarding an inter-Korean railway in the western part of the
country.
"It is believed that the body was washed down here along with debris after heavy rains in the North's flooded rivers," said the Red Cross, which
is South Korea's main channel for humanitarian issues involving North Korea.
The Korean Peninsula is in the grip of a rainy season that has lasted for months. Heavy rains pounded both sides of the border, but it is likely that the impoverished North, which has yet to report any human deaths, suffered heavier damage because of its lack of investment in flood control.
South Korea's Red Cross has proposed aid worth 10 billion won (US$8.6 million) to help the North recover from recent floods that swamped homes and
farmland, but the communist state's Red Cross responded by asking for items that its southern counterpart did not initially offer, such as rice and heavy equipment.
The South Korean government, which will likely finance a significant portion of the proposed aid, has yet to determine whether it will comply
with the request.