Explosion Rips Through Russian Apartment Block

Preliminary terms says that the explosion was caused by an unidentified explosive device.

An explosion tore through an apartment building early on Wednesday, killing two people in the southern Russian city which is to host the Winter Olympics in six years, police and emergency services said.

Police said one of the victims was a 14-year-old boy and the other an elderly woman.

A gas canister had been found at the scene, but police did not know if this was the source of the explosion or if the blast was an act of terrorism.

"We cannot say what the cause of the explosion was until investigators have examined the scene," a duty officer in the local police told Reuters.

Russian television showed a firefighter carrying a child down a ladder propped against the building.

Neighbours stared down from upper-floor balconies as curtains hung limply from the shattered windows of the apartment where the explosion occurred.

Interfax said emergency workers had sealed off access to the building and were evacuating residents. It said the blast, which took place at about 5 a.m. (0100 GMT), had wrecked the first four floors of the 12-storey apartment block.

Ambulances and fire engines rushed to the scene of the blast in a suburb of Sochi, a Black Sea resort which is a popular holiday destination for Russians.

"We can say in preliminary terms that the explosion was caused by an unidentified explosive device," Interfax news agency quoted Valery Khan, an investigator with the local prosecutor's office, as saying.

"According to unconfirmed information, it could not have been a gas explosion because the building was not connected to the gas," he said.

A spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry told Reuters by telephone from Sochi: "We know of two dead and it is not being ruled out that it was a terrorist attack. A gas explosion is ruled out because the building used electric cookers."

However, other officials told Interfax that people in the building may have smuggled in gas cylinders to use for cooking.

The International Olympic Committee has awarded Sochi the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, a decision the Kremlin has portrayed as an international vote of confidence in Russia.

The city is close to Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region, scene of long-running insurgencies against Moscow's rule. It is also close to Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia which fought a separatist war in the 1990s.