SEOUL : A court on Thursday rejected South Korea's first lawsuits filed by cancer victims and relatives against a tobacco firm, saying there is no evidence their diseases were caused by smoking.

Although the judges accepted there is a link between smoking and cancer, they said it was not possible to prove smoking was the cause of death in individual cases.

The two lawsuits were filed in December 1999 seeking damages against Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Co (KTG), which was then a state-owned firm.

A total of 36 people, including cancer patients and their relatives brought, the suits. Four of the victims have since died.

One of their lawyers described the decision as "outrageous" and said it flew in the face of commonly accepted medical knowledge.

"Although there is pathological correlation between their smoking and the diseases ... there is no evidence to acknowledge that the lung and larynx cancers of the complainants were caused by smoking the cigarettes sold by the defendant," Yonhap news agency quoted the court ruling as saying.

"Pathological causality is statistical correlation between specific causes and diseases on the assumption that other conditions are equal. Therefore, it is difficult to apply the causality to individual cases to determine the causes for a specific disease of an individual."

The court also said there was no evidence to support complainants' claims that the KTG cigarettes were flawed in manufacturing and design and in failing to warn of the health risks involved in smoking.

"No evidence exists that proves that the complainants' disease could not be avoided because of nicotine dependency," the court added.

KTG welcomed the decision but lawyers for the complainants said they would appeal to a higher court.

"This is just outrageous. The court ruling gave protection to a business firm that lives on harmful product as it ignored risks from smoking to public health," said Bae Geum-Ja, one of the lawyers.

She said the court turned a blind eye to experts' opinions that smoking was the main cause of the complainants' disease.

If the court's logic about the division between statistical causality and individual cancer cases holds, she said, it would be impossible for any victims of diseases that could be caused by more than one factor to seek damages.

"It also runs against the medical common sense that tobacco contains more than 60 cancer-causing materials and more than 4,000 toxic chemicals," Bae said.

She also noted that warnings about health risks were not printed on South Korean cigarette packs until 1989.

"One of my clients started smoking in 1960 and he had not been alerted to the health risks for 29 years," she told journalists.

Park Won-rak, a public relations official for KTG, welcomed the court's ruling as a wise decision.

"Even if a similar lawsuit comes in the future, we expect the same result," he said.

The cancer victims and their relatives had filed two lawsuits against KTG, demanding a combined 470 million won (now 500,000 dollars) in damages.

The court battle focused on three points -- how to define the causality between smoking and lung cancer, whether long-term smoking leads to addictiveness that prevents quitting and whether KTG gave enough warnings about health risks.

About 49,000 Koreans are estimated to die each year of smoking-related diseases, according to the private Korean Association of Smoking and Health.

"I'm afraid the ruling would send a wrong signal to young people that smoking is not so bad to your health," Lee Bok-Geun, the chief planning official of the anti-smoking association, told AFP. - AFP /dt