Disasters & Accidents

Fire at Kazakh arsenal that killed 13 extinguished

Nur-Sultan, Aug 28 (EFE).- Kazakhstan’s Defense Minister said Saturday that the fire that broke out Thursday at a military arsenal in the south of the country killing 13 people has been extinguished.

“All the fires have been extinguished,” Nurlan Yermekbayev said on the Defense Ministry’s Telegram channel.

More than 60 people were injured in the incident, mostly emergency personnel and a dozen servicemen, who were hospitalized in the city of Taraz, located several kilometers from the Central Asian country’s border with Kyrgyzstan.

According to the Defense Ministry, the fatalities occurred during efforts to extinguish the fire at the arsenal of the 28349 military engineers and sappers unit in the Zhambyl province.

Yermekbayev said that almost all of the people evacuated from the village of Kainar, which is located less than a kilometer from the military unit where the fire occurred, have returned to their homes.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared Sunday as a day of national mourning for those killed.

Kazakh authorities are not ruling out any possible cause of the fire, including sabotage.

This is the second incident at a Kazakh arsenal in just over two years.

In June 2019, a series of explosions at a military installation near the city of Arys, in southern Kazakhstan, forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants. EFE

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