Vietnam to ban traffic on Kim arrival route
23 February, 2019
Vietnam will ban traffic on the road North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is expected to take from a train station on the Chinese border to the capital of Hanoi, ahead of his summit next week with U.S. President Donald Trump, state media reported on Friday.
Vietnam has been preparing for Kim to arrive by train for the Feb. 27-28 summit in Hanoi, two sources with direct knowledge of security and logistics planning said Wednesday.
Kim’s train will stop at the border station of Dong Dang, where he will disembark and proceed 170 kilometers to Hanoi by car, the sources said. Vietnamese police have stepped up security at the station in anticipation of an “important event.”
Traffic on that route will be partially banned from 7 p.m. on Feb. 25 and fully banned from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Feb. 26, the ruling Communist Party’s Nhan Dan paper reported, citing the Directorate for Roads of Vietnam.
In a statement issued late Friday, the People’s Committee of Lang Son province, where Dong Dang station is located, said it would tighten security on the road. Roadworks there will be suspended from Feb. 24 until Feb. 28, the statement said.
It was not clear if Kim would take the thousands of kilometers journey from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, through China to the Vietnamese border, or first fly to a nearby Chinese city and then take the train.
In the Chinese border city of Dandong, however, the main hotel which overlooks the bridge into isolated North Korea said it was not taking reservations for Saturday because it was “undergoing renovations.”
And a diplomatic source in the Chinese city of Shenyang said that a train carrying Kim is expected to pass the area on Saturday.
Kim to visit in ‘coming days’
HANOI (Reuters) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will make an official visit to Vietnam in the “coming days,” the southeast Asian nation’s foreign ministry said Saturday.
Kim is visiting at the invitation of Nguyen Phu Trong, the president and general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, the ministry said in a statement.