‘Gas leak set off school blast’

Press, 25 October 1980, Page 8

‘Gas leak set off school blast’

NZPA-Reuter Ortuella The Spanish authorities said yesterday that a gas leakage apparently caused an explosion that killed 48 children and three adults in a school in Ortuella, northern Spain. Anguished parents rushed to the school after the blast searching in despair among the debris for their missing children. Some parents carried off dead children in their arms and eye-witnesses said a Civil Guard tackled a grief-stricken mother, who tried to jump from a building shouting “my two sons are there.”

The Interior Minister (Mr Juan Jose Roson) said the explosion was caused by a gas bubble, possibly ignited by a welding torch.

The province’s civil governor said propane gas

probably leaked from the kitchen and accumulated under three ground floor . classrooms filled with about 80 children. The explosion was the worst in Spain since a gas tanker truck exploded outside a crowded camp-site two years ago, killing 200 holiday-makers. Meanwhile, gunmen believed to be Basque separatists shot dead three men in separate attaclcs yesterday, taking to 93 the number of people killed in political violence in the Basque country this year, police sources said. Alejandro Estreniana, an unemployed clerk believed to be an ultra-Rightist, was shot by two men in Amorabieta.

A leading Basque politician and a telephone company executive were shot earlier in the day in Elgoibar and San Sebastian.