Venemaa põeb "augusti sündroomi"
Kommentaari jätmiseks loo konto või logi sisse
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Venemaal tulevad hädad kõige sagedamini kaela augustis:
1991 - kommunistid võtsid maha Gorbachovi
1996 - tsetseeni partisanid võtsid tagasi Groznõi
1998 - võlakirjade default'imine ja rubla devalveerumine
1999 - Vene vägede kaotused Tsetseenias
2000 - aatomiallveelaeva "Kursk" põhjaminek ja Ostankino telemasti põlemine
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Huvitav, mis see aasta saatusel Venemaale plaanis on?
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Ütleks nii, et Augusti sündroom on nakkav. Dollar on nüüd ka nakatunud.
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MOSCOW, Aug 21, 2002 (The Canadian Press via COMTEX) -- Emergency crews pulled
a seventh body Wednesday from the ruins of a residential building in Moscow,
which was torn open by an explosion that left a 15-metre-wide gash and collapsed
five storeys of apartments.
It was unclear how many people were in the apartments when the blast occurred
late Tuesday night. After emergency crews had toiled through the night,
Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said that as many as 12 people might
have been trapped in the debris.
He said that investigators were still trying to determine from a list of
residents how many might have been on vacation, at work or at their summer
cottages at the time of the explosion.
A spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, Tatiana Andreyeva, said
Wednesday morning that at least seven people had been killed in the blast.
Russian television reported that the bodies included that of a mother and her
eight-month-old baby and a six-year-old girl.
Shoigu, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to lead the rescue effort,
said a natural gas leak was the most likely cause of the explosion at the
building in northern Moscow, near the Ostankino television tower. A Moscow
prosecutor, Mikhail Avdyukov, said that investigators had identified the source
of the gas leak as an apartment on the second floor.
Shoigu earlier said that four people were pulled alive from the ruins, according
to the Interfax news agency. ITAR-Tass, however, said that eight people were
pulled out, including a woman with burns over 80 per cent of her body.
Russian news agencies said about 40 apartments had been destroyed.
Nadyezhda Medvedeva was standing outside the ruins waiting for news of her
friend, who lived with her family in a fourth-floor apartment that was wrecked
in the blast.
"They just got back from vacation today," she said.
Medvedeva, who lives around the corner, said the blast made her windows shake.
"It was such an explosion," said 78-year-old resident Zinaida Burlakova, who sat
outside a first aid tent. "I thought at first it was thunder, the walls were
shaking. I was afraid to go outside. Then someone came to my door and started
yelling, 'Go outside!' "
As emergency workers used a large crane to pick through the wreckage under
floodlights, the interiors of apartments were visible where the wall had come
down - revealing curtains, interior doors, carpets and other furnishings
suddenly left open to the night air.
Rescuers used heavy machinery to move large chunks of rubble, then clambered on
the piles and shone flashlights down into the wreckage. Toward dawn, emergency
workers cut the engines of bulldozers and other equipment at the site several
times to allow sniffer dogs to do their job in silence.
Most Russian apartments use natural gas for cooking. Leaks from aging pipes and
stoves are common, killing and injuring scores of people every year.
But the explosion raised fears of a terrorist attack, too. Nikolai Patrushev,
the head of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB and the
agency overseeing the conduct of the war in Chechnya, rushed to the site with
other high-ranking officials.
Building residents said that after the explosion they smelled gunpowder, but not
gas. However, experts said the smell could have been exploding plaster, which
also sent billows of white smoke into the darkness.
Three years ago, a series of apartment house explosions that authorities blamed
on Chechen rebels rocked Moscow and other cities, killing about 300 people.
Those blasts, which became one of the Kremlin's arguments for sending troops
back into the separatist region, severely unnerved Russians.
While the main rebel forces have been severely depleted and the Russian
government claims that the war is all but over, rebels continue to unleash
attacks that kill Russian servicemen and Moscow-allied Chechen officials
virtually every day.
Rebel attacks have picked up in recent weeks, and investigators say the rebels
are probably responsible for the crash of a troop transport helicopter on
Monday, which caused the biggest single-day Russian toll of the war: 115 dead
and 33 injured. A top military prosecutor, Sergei Fridinsky, confirmed Wednesday
that investigators had found part of a Strela anti-aircraft missile launcher
near the helicopter crash site, Interfax reported.
