Japan-China asylum spat ends

The five asylum seekers as they tried to enter the Japanese consulate

BEIJING, China -- Five North Korean asylum seekers, who have been at the center of a spat between China and Japan, have been released and are headed for South Korea via Manila.

The five were dragged from the Japanese consulate in Shenyang by Chinese police two weeks ago and kept in custody, sparking a diplomatic deadlock between the two countries.

The incident, captured in videotape and played prominently overseas, outraged the Japanese government and public.

Tokyo said China was violating international law by going into the compound without permission, but Beijing officials were far from apologetic, saying the guards acted with consent from Japanese consular officers and were merely trying to protect them from "unknown intruders".

But in what appeared to be a resolution to the case, airport officials told Reuters news agency that the five -- two men, two women and a three-year old girl -- left on a China Southern airlines flight on Wednesday afternoon.

Mad dashes

CNN NewsPass VIDEO CNN's Rebecca MacKinnon has more on the case of the five North Korean asylum seekers sparking a dispute between China and Japan. Play video   GALLERY Police thwart the attempt for asylum     CNN.com Asia More news from our Asia edition

They boarded the plane in Beijing under Chinese police guard, bound for the Philippines.

Manila's foreign undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin said the Philippines agreed on humanitarian grounds to act as a transit point for the North Koreans.

The five North Koreans were the latest asylum seekers to dash into diplomatic consulates on mainland China, desperately seeking safe passage to South Korea through a third country

North Korean refugees hiding in China have dashed into the Spanish, German, American and Canadian consulates in recent times.

In Beijing, several consulates have become targets of asylum seekers, prompting police to double up guards, heighten patrol and throw up barbed wire fences around them.

International aid organizations estimate that over 100,000 North Koreans have crossed into China in recent years to escape chronic famine and political repression.

Some of them have gone back and forth to secure food or cash and help out their families. Others have blended and disappeared into the Korean community.

North Koreans make the bid for freedom through consulates in China

Still others have been hiding as fugitives. Beijing insists these Koreans are "economic migrants", not refugees. China has mostly looked the other way.

But this flurry of asylum seeking has put China in a tough spot. The Chinese do not want to be portrayed as inhumane toward the North Korean refugees, but they also do not wish to embarrass or offend their North Korean allies.

Most of all, they fear that a trickle of asylum seekers now could build up into a raging flood later.

More than two dozen asylum seekers have succeeded in making the bid for freedom after slipping into the consulates in China over the past two months.