ARKHANGELSK, Russia, 17 March 2004 — At least 21 people, including two children, were killed and dozens more feared dead yesterday after an explosion at an apartment building in northern Russia that officials said was likely caused by a gas leak.
Up to 80 people were thought to be inside the building in the port city of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea when a blast ripped through it before dawn yesterday, according to news agency and television reports.
“It is difficult to say how many people died, but many did. The explosion happened when people were asleep,” said Mikhail Busin, the official in charge of rescue operations, according to Interfax.
“According to our calculations 50 people could be still under there,” Deputy Emergencies Minister Yuri Vorobyov told NTV television. A ministry spokeswoman in Moscow said 15 people had died.
“I was on the sixth floor. I woke up because of a loud roar,” said Svetlana Andrievskaya, speaking from a hospital bed. “I could see the room but there was no wall.”
Officials said a gas leak was the likely cause of the blast, but would not rule out an attack. Rescuers have pulled 21 bodies out of the rubble. The blast injured 24 people, 16 of whom have been hospitalized, seven in critical condition, rescue officials said.
The explosion around 3:00 a.m. (0000 GMT) ripped through one of the entrances of a nine-story building. It was so powerful that the entrance, which led to 36 ground floor apartments, folded like a house of cards and left behind it a pile of rubble three stories high.
One couple who lived on the eighth floor miraculously survived the blast when their bed landed on top of the rubble, rescuers told AFP. The blast threw their son out of his bed onto the balcony, from where rescuers lifted him with a light foot fracture.
“The building began to shake,” Taisiya Matonina, a pensioner, told AFP. “Windows shattered, furniture broke. Soon the rescuers came. I only had time to throw a coat over my nightgown and take my documents.”
“I woke up from the din,” Svetlana, a survivor, told Russian television. “I felt like I was suffocating, there was so much dust,” said another survivor, Anna. Rescuers said they smelled gas when they first arrived at the scene and an official with the regional Arkhoblgaz company told television that two other gas leaks had been reported and repaired in the city in the night.
Police were searching for two men whom eyewitnesses saw carrying pipes and instruments out of the building the previous day. Local police said that the men, who appeared to have been homeless, could have taken gas valves in order to sell them as scrap metal.
Gas valves were missing at the two other leaks discovered on Monday night, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted police as saying. Investigators have not discounted that the blast could have been an intentional attack.
“The possibility of an attack has not been ruled out,” a spokesman from the prosecutor’s office told the Interfax news agency. An official with the FSB (ex-KGB) intelligence service told RIA Novosti that “for the moment we have not found any evidence of explosive devices.”
Scores of rescuers picked their way through mounds of rubble, their task hampered by poor light until dawn broke. Cranes pulled free slabs of concrete and sofas and smashed furniture littered the area.
Meanwhile, a Russian man in Switzerland whose family died in a midair crash said he “probably” killed the air traffic controller on duty the night his wife and children perished, Swiss police said yesterday.
The Zurich-based controller was temporarily alone in charge of air traffic over Switzerland and southern Germany on the night in 2002 when a holiday charter, carrying more than 50 Russian children, and a DHL cargo jet collided.
The 48-year-old Russian, earlier named by Russian Embassy officials as Vitaly Kaloyev, was arrested the day after the Danish air traffic controller was stabbed to death in front of his home near Zurich airport last month. Police said it appeared to be a revenge attack linked to the airliner crash.
Kaloyev made what Zurich prosecutor Pascal Gossner described as a partial confession in front of his lawyer on Monday. He admitted to going to the controller’s home in order to get him to apologize for the crash in which 71 people died.
