Toll in Hundreds Feared in Ammo Blast in Ethiopia

Hundreds of people were believed killed or injured when this city’s largest ammunition and fuel depot exploded early Tuesday morning in what Ethiopia’s new leaders called an act of sabotage by agents of the previous regime.

Repeated blasts, which began shortly after 4 a.m., illuminated the night sky with fireballs and showers of red and green tracer bullets. Rockets ignited by the fire roared off, landing miles away.

The windows of buildings as far as two miles away were shattered. The site was still burning in the evening, with flames threatening to ignite more fuel storage tanks in the area.

The human toll could be catastrophic. The immediate area surrounding the site is a shantytown of flimsy wood and tin structures housing 8,000 to 10,000 people, most of whom are unaccounted for, local authorities said. Late Tuesday, crews from the Ethiopian Red Cross began the chore of digging under the flattened shacks to find victims.

“They are lifting the roofs, moving the walls to see how many people are buried under the houses,” Dr. Tebebe Yemani Birhan, head of the Ethiopian Red Cross, said at the site. “It will take some number of days.” Tebebe noted that only a small road leads out of the district: “I don’t think everyone managed to get away from all this.”

The city’s two leading civilian hospitals reported a total of only three dead, including a Kenyan sound technician for a British Broadcasting Corp. camera crew filming close to the site, and about 50 injured. Tebebe, however, cautioned that those figures largely covered people injured on the streets around the site, not those in homes.

The explosion came almost exactly one week after troops of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front entered Addis Ababa in force to assume governmental responsibilities after the flight into exile of the country’s dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and the collapse of his regime.

A spokesman for the EPRDF said the blast was triggered by a grenade attack on the depot by someone acting for the deposed government. Tekla Woin, head of relief activities for the front, said an intruder launched a grenade at two tanker trucks full of fuel parked just outside the depot.

“Someone saw this happen,” he said. Sources said one of the attackers had been wounded and captured by EPRDF troops. The Democratic Front has previously charged that the former government had a scorched-earth plan for its withdrawal from the capital.

Woin’s account, if true, underscores the fragility of the Ethiopian capital’s post-revolution peace, given the huge quantity of armaments stored around town and in private hands. The front has said that 70,000 guns, many of them sold by deserting government soldiers during the final days of the previous regime, are unaccounted for in the city, and it has been conducting a house-to-house search to confiscate them. Other observers, however, estimate the figure at many times that amount.

The explosion seems certain to delay progress toward normality in this city of 2.5 million, which since May 28 has been under the control of the Democratic Front, formerly a rebel movement. Among other things, the new administration may put off the long-awaited reopening of Addis Ababa International Airport, which a spokesman said had been scheduled for Thursday.

The airport has been closed since May 27, when rebel forces first moved within artillery range of its runway. The shutdown has seriously hampered famine relief efforts throughout the country, where as many as 7 million people face starvation because of drought and civil war.

There were fears in the capital that Tuesday’s attack might be the start of a series of sabotage assaults designed to undermine the new regime.

But some observers speculated that, rather than heralding an outbreak of organized resistance to the regime, Tuesday’s blast represented “the trailing off of organized resistance . . . the death throes, the last jerk of the Dergue (the former government),” in the words of one Western diplomat here.

Tuesday’s fire was the third such episode at an urban armory since the Democratic Front entered Addis Ababa last week. An ammunition dump erupted on the grounds of the presidential palace during the rebels’ entry into the city last week, and there was a subsequent fire at a city depot later that day. The latter fire took an estimated 800 lives, Tebebe said, many of them people who were looting the site at the time.

There are at least two other such depots scattered around the city. “We will take maximum precautions now” with the others, Tekla of the Democratic Front said.

Located in Nefas Silk, a low-income residential and light-industrial district on the southern edge of Addis Ababa, the depot that burned Tuesday was the Ethiopian army’s largest supply and ammunition dump in the city. And it was next to at least four commercial fuel depots.