Jalalabad warehouse blast likely an accident

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- A preliminary investigation shows a warehouse explosion that devastated a neighborhood and killed at least 14 people in this eastern Afghan city was an accident and not an act of terror, the Afghan foreign minister said Saturday.

The head of the construction company that owned the warehouse said the building housed stocks of explosives for road-building.

Foreign Minister Abdullah, meeting with reporters in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said authorities would look at what negligence may have been involved. "There might have been some mistakes in maintaining the amount of explosives that were kept in reserve in that building," he said.

In addition to the dead, about 90 people were reported injured in the blast.

Abdullah's statements followed 24 hours of persistent speculation among police and military officials here that the warehouse might have been blown up by terrorists in order to damage a nearby hydroelectric dam and the Jalalabad power system. The theories reflected the general nervousness about terrorism in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The thunderous blast at midday Friday destroyed about 50 surrounding houses and damaged hundreds of others in western Jalalabad, and damaged the power system of the Darunta hydroelectric dam, just 200 yards from the warehouse, knocking out city power until repairs were completed early Saturday.

All that remained of the Afghan Construction and Logistics Unit warehouse was piles of brick and machinery. Houses in all directions were leveled or burned by the blast, and windows were blown out as far as a mile away.

Although national television late Friday reported a death toll of 25, police and hospital officials said 13 people had died, and a 14th body was reported discovered Saturday in the blast area.

The company director, Mohammad Karim, told The Associated Press the facility housed 20 pounds of a manufactured explosive, Vibox -- seemingly too little to cause such devastation. But he also said an unspecified amount of urea, a fertilizer material that can be used to make explosives, was stored at the warehouse.

"I don't have any information about this explosion, whether it was a terrorist attack or not," he said by telephone from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Later Saturday, however, Foreign Minister Abdullah was more definitive.

"So far the results of the investigations which have been carried out by the local authorities as well as people who were sent from here shows that it has been an accident," Abdullah said in Kabul, 70 miles west of here.

"Whether proper care was taken or attention paid in order to provide security of the explosives -- that is something we have to look at," said Abdullah, who has become something of a government spokesman because of his frequent meetings with the news media.

Police took a half-dozen company employees into custody for questioning.

The damage to the dam was one reason authorities suspected terrorism after the explosion on Friday.

A military officer at the scene, Maj. Abdul Qayoom Azimi, said extra security was recently placed at the dam after information was received that there would be an attempt to sabotage the site. He speculated that terrorists may have assembled explosives in the warehouse over time, and they were either deliberately or accidentally set off.

The fear of terrorism by Taliban or al-Qaida remnants runs high in Jalalabad and much of the rest of Afghanistan eight months after a U.S.-led military campaign brought down Afghanistan's Taliban government and crippled its allies of the al-Qaida terror network.

Afghan Construction and Logistics Unit was founded as a non-governmental service organization with U.S. funding, but U.S. support was withdrawn about a decade ago. It has since continued operations as a private company fulfilling contracts from international organizations.