More than 100 revellers have been killed in an explosion in a Russian nightclub, according to news agency reports. The blast rocked the Lame Horse club in the city of Perm, Russia’s sixth largest city, at 11.15pm local time on Friday night.
The club, situated in the centre of the city, was thought to have been packed with 200 people at the time, said Itar-Tass news agency. Initial reports suggested that 15 people had died, but the death toll rose quickly as bodies were pulled from the building.
Interfax news agency quoted police officials as saying that the explosion was caused by fireworks.
”We are not talking about an act of terrorism in the Perm cafe — people died as a result of an explosion of fireworks,” an official from the Russian prosecutor’s office told Interfax.
Russian state-run television channel Vesti-24 showed bodies piled on top of each other in the street outside the club. Many more revellers were taken to local hospitals, some seriously injured, reports said.
Perm, near the Ural mountains, has a population of 1,2-million and is about 1 120km east of Moscow.
The tragedy comes just days after Russian investigators blamed terrorism for a devastating train crash in which 26 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
The Nevsky Express was sent hurtling off the rails as it made its way from Moscow to St Petersburg last Friday. The luxury train, carrying 661 passengers, derailed close to the village of Uglovka, 320km north of Moscow.
The head of Russia’s railways, Vladimir Yakunin, said he believed an ”unidentified device” had exploded under the train, derailing three carriages.
Yakunin said the incident was ”analogous” to another derailment on the same line three years ago, also involving the Nevsky Express, in which 19 people were injured.
Russian prosecutors blamed the earlier derailment on Chechen extremists, who have been fighting an on-off war against the Russian state for two decades.
Fighters have carried out numerous attacks in recent months, including suicide bombings, in an apparent attempt to establish an Islamist caliphate in the north Caucasus region. There are daily attacks on security forces in the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.
Russia has been hit by a number of major terrorist attacks since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including the seizures by Chechen extremists of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow in October 2002 and the taking of more than 1 000 hostages at Beslan’s School Number One in September 2004. – guardian.co.uk