PARIS: French rescuers scoured the rubble for a missing person on Thursday, a day after a blast ripped through a building in central Paris, leaving four seriously injured.
On Wednesday afternoon an explosion tore through a building on Saint-Jacques Street in the 5th district, close to the Luxembourg Gardens and at the edge of the Latin Quarter, a top tourism area in the French capital.
The blast left four people seriously injured, while 33 others sustained lesser injuries, according to police.
“The search is continuing,” police said on Thursday, saying rescuers were looking for one person still not accounted for – down from two earlier Thursday morning.
The blast blew out windows up to 400 meters (yards) away, and was followed by a major fire which caused the building, housing a fashion school, to collapse.
Some 70 fire trucks and 270 firefighters battled the blaze before it was contained.
Early Thursday, the security cordon had been reduced, allowing journalists and gawkers closer to the heap of rubble in front of the structure.
A single fire hose was still spraying the remains of the building now and then, while some shops had reopened on the street of the blast.
The mayor of the 5th district said a gas explosion was behind the collapse, but this has not yet been confirmed by other officials.
Some witnesses spoken to by AFP reported noticing a strong smell of gas in the street before the explosion, but officials said they did not have enough evidence to determine the cause of the blast with certainty.
An investigation into the causes was launched immediately, prosecutors said.
There have been several incidents of gas-related blasts in the French capital.
In January 2019, a suspected leak in a buried gas pipe destroyed a building on the Rue de Trevise in the ninth district, killing four people including two firefighters.
The shockwave blew out scores of nearby windows, and dozens of families were forced to evacuate their homes for months.
Much of the street still remains off limits four years after the disaster.
Rescuers comb through rubble of Paris building blast
https://arab.news/paphh
Rescuers comb through rubble of Paris building blast
- Explosion leaves four people seriously injured, while 33 others sustain lesser injuries
- Rescuers looking for one person still not accounted for, down from two earlier
Russian minister visits Cuba as Trump ramps up pressure on Havana
- The Russian embassy in Havana said the minister would “hold a series of bilateral meetings” while in Cuba
HAVANA: Russia’s interior minister began a visit to ally Cuba on Tuesday, a show of solidarity after US President Donald Trump warned that the island’s longtime communist government “is ready to fall.”
Trump this month warned Havana to “make a deal,” the nature of which he did not divulge, or pay a price similar to Venezuela, whose leader Nicolas Maduro was ousted by US forces in a January 3 bombing raid that killed dozens of people.
Venezuela was a key ally of Cuba and a critical supplier of oil and money, which Trump has vowed to cut off.
“We in Russia regard this as an act of unprovoked armed aggression against Venezuela,” Russia’s Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev told Russian state TV Rossiya-1 of the US actions after landing in Cuba.
“This act cannot be justified in any way and once again proves the need to increase vigilance and consolidate all efforts to counter external factors,” he added.
The Russian embassy in Havana said the minister would “hold a series of bilateral meetings” while in Cuba.
Russia and Cuba, both under Western sanctions, have intensified their relations since 2022, with an isolated Moscow seeking new friends and trading partners since its invasion of Ukraine.
Cuba needs all the help it can get as it grapples with its worst economic crisis in decades and now added pressure from Washington.
Trump has warned that acting President Delcy Rodriguez will pay “a very big price” if she does not toe Washington’s line — specifically on access to Venezuela’s oil and loosening ties with US foes Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.
On Tuesday, Russia’s ambassador to Havana, Victor Koronelli, wrote on X that Kolokoltsev was in Cuba “to strengthen bilateral cooperation and the fight against crime.”
The US chief of mission in Cuba, Mike Hammer, meanwhile, met the head of the US Southern Command in Miami on Tuesday “to discuss the situation in Cuba and the Caribbean,” the embassy said on X.
The command is responsible for American forces operating in Central and South America that have carried out seizures of tankers transporting Venezuelan oil and strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats.
- Soldiers killed -
Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the revolution that swept communist Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
Havana and Moscow were close communist allies during the Cold War, but that cooperation was abruptly halted in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.
The deployment of Soviet nuclear missile sites on the island triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Washington and Moscow came close to war.
During his first presidential term, Trump walked back a detente with Cuba launched by his predecessor Barack Obama.
Thirty-two Cuban soldiers, some of them assigned to Maduro’s security detail, were killed in the US strikes that saw the Venezuelan strongman whisked away in cuffs to stand trial in New York.
Kolokoltsev attended a memorial for the fallen men on Tuesday.
