Rescue teams are still working to find other victims. At least three people were killed this “violent explosion” this Saturday, March 15, due to unspecified ammunition, which occurred in the Syrian coastal city of Lttaquié, bastion of fallen president Bashar al-Assad and theater in recent weeks of massacres of civilians, the official Sana agency reported.
The explosion is an “accident caused by a scrap dealer who dismantled an unplodced rocket at home,” said the Syrian Human Rights Observatory (OSDH).
“The explosion in the Al-Rimal district, in the city of Lattaquié, has so far killed three dead and twelve injured,” said the agency, adding that “the civil protection teams and the inhabitants were still looking for other injured and disappeared”. The origin of the blast in this coastal city in western Syria was not immediately known.
People stuck under the rubble
A resident of the neighborhood, Ward Jammoul, 32, told AFP to have heard a “strong explosion”, adding that she had gone there and had seen “a completely destroyed building”. Rescuers and ambulances were dispatched to the site. A large number of inhabitants “were looking for people trapped under the rubble,” she said.
An image broadcast by the Sana agency showed a large plume of smoke rising above a populated district.
Massacres took place in coastal cities in western Syria, in particular in Lattaquié last week, attributed to the security forces and allied armed groups and which, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (OSDH), nearly 1,400 civilian deaths, mostly from the Alawite Muslim community from which the fallen president is.