Up to 10 Reported Dead, 27 Injured in Moscow Explosion

An explosion shattered a police station Wednesday night, and conflicting accounts said as many as 10 people were killed and 27 injured.

Officials said workers apparently left the site 10 minutes before the blast and might have forgotten a burning cigarette inside. But they did not rule out that the explosion resulted from a criminal attack.

The Interfax news agency said the blast occurred in a basement area used to store cans of paint and other materials. It said a district housing maintenance service shared the building with the passport office of police station No. 44.

Other witnesses said a succession of three blasts, two of them very powerful, tore through the building. The Itar-Tass news agency reported that one explosion occurred in early evening as people milled around a desk where internal travel papers were being processed.

Igor Nadezhdin, spokesman for Moscow’s municipal medical department, said five bodies had been recovered, and rescue teams were searching for other victims in the rubble of the two-story building.

The official count was at least 10 dead and 21 injured.

But Interfax reported a different casualty toll of six dead and 27 injured, five of them children. It said four of the injured were in serious condition.