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MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian news agencies reported on Wednesday that an explosion at a college in the port city of Kerch, Crimea, had left 10 dead and scores injured, the Kremlin reported on Wednesday.
According to preliminary information on the explosion in Crimea – a Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed to Ukraine four years ago -, repressive sources said the alleged cause was a reservoir of gas that would have exploded.
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that terrorism was among the versions under study and that President Vladimir Putin had ordered the security services to investigate.
The Russian news agency RIA, quoted by an official of the National Counter-Terrorism Committee, said the explosion was caused by an unknown explosive device.
An employee of a Kerch hospital reportedly stated that 18 people had already been admitted for injuries due to the explosion and that doctors were expecting that about fifty additional people would be brought.
"There are already a lot of people in the emergency room and in the operating room," said the employee quoted by the TASS news agency.
Photographs of the explosion scene published by the local media Kerch.FM showed that the windows of the ground floor of the two-storey building had been blown and that debris from the building lay at the same time. outside.
Ambulances and firefighters were on the scene. A person could be seen on a stretcher boarding a bus.
The Technical College offers vocational training to teenage students.
Russia annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014, provoking international condemnation and Western sanctions. Kerch is the point of the peninsula where a bridge connecting Crimea to Russia arises on the Crimean side.
Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the bridge to road traffic in May this year, taking the wheel of a truck to cross it.
Report of Vladimir Soldatkin; Writings by Tom Balmforth and Christian Lowe; Edited by Andrew Osborn
