BEIJING (AFP) - Forty-four North Korean men, women and children scaled the walls of the Canadian embassy in Beijing 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 a desperate attempt to escape poverty and oppression in 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 afternoon Wednesday.
Footage of the break-in seen on CNN, showed people, some dressed in military fatigues and construction hats, hurriedly scaling ladders and throwing themselves over the fence.
A dozen or so police were seen milling around outside the compound mid-afternoon, while a ladder was lying on the sidewalk about 50 meters (yards) from the main gate.
Given the number of people involved, the dramatic action was likely to have been preceded by careful planning, diplomats said.
"If there are up to 40 people, it usually means that it was organized and quite often in these kind of cases some non-governmental organizations are involved," one East Asian diplomat told AFP.
In recent years, scores of North Koreans have won political asylum in South Korea after they successfully scaled walls of diplomatic missions in China.
Earlier this month, 29 asylum seekers broke into the compound of Japan's embassy-run school and have been slowly and quietly spirited out of the country.
Following that incident, China's foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan accused rights groups of aiding the refugees in breaking into foreign missions.
"Sometimes, people who entered China illegally are incited by these so-called human rights groups to cause trouble, to barge into the embassies and to make a big deal," he said.
"We have long opposed this type of behaviour."
The incident also follows a high-profile case in July when 468 North Korean refugees who had been holed up in Vietnam were airlifted to South Korea in the biggest mass defection since the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War.
China treats North Koreans as illegal immigrants and has an agreement with Pyongyang to deport those it catches. But it has allowed Koreans who succeed in getting into foreign missions to leave for South Korea via a third country.
Those returned can face harsh punishment by the Stalinist government.
The impoverished nation has been ravaged by successive years of natural disaster and bad planning, making it the largest recipient of food aid by the UN World Food Program since the late 1990s.