DISASTROUS FIRE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 81, 3 October 1910, Page 7

DISASTROUS FIRE.

■♦ 1 NEWSPAPER OF FICE DESTROYED LARGE LOSS OF LIFE. THE ORIGIN A MYSTERY. By Telegraph.— Press Association.— Copyright. SAN FRANCISCO, Ist October. A terrible explosion and fire occurred in the Los Angeles Times building at Los Angeles at midnight on Friday, resulting in the complete destruction of the buikling and plant, valued at £100,000. Crowds of people watched men, whose escape from the upper floors was cut off by the flames, fall backwards through the' windows. The death-roll was first expected to reach fifty, but the estimates vary. The origin of the explosion is a mystery, as all the various plants in. the offices were worked by electricity. The latest intelligence attributes the explosion to dynamite, and states that a score of the employees are missing. Many who got out of the bnilding were seriously injured. DISCOVERY OF BOMBS. LEADING MEN THREATENED. A NARROW ESCAPE. LABOUR UNIONS CHARGED WITH THE OUTRAGE. NEW YORK, Ist October. Later news from. Los Angeles states that bombs were found in. the homes of the secretary of tho Merchants and Manufacturers' Association, and of General. Otis, editor-in-chief of the Times. The death-roll is now ascertained., nineteen. Beverar oi tEe editors leaped from the windows and were killed by the- fail. The newspapers, in a special edition this evening, charge the labour unions with the responsibility for the outrage. General Otis io a millionaire, who has fought the unions for twenty years. Ho •employed no union men. The bomb at General Otis's house was concealed in a suit case hidden in a vine outside the drawingroom window. The police chief took the bomb in an automobile to a neighbouring park, where it exploded as the detectives ran for their lives, and the whole neighbourhood became panic-striken. The bombs were timed to explode simultaneously with the Times office explosion, but the mechanism, was faulty. Each infernal machine weighed fifty pounds. General Otis arrived from Mexico this evening, and was cheered by a crowd at the railway station. The police find that the dynamite in one of the bombs was ueed on work at an aqueduct in course of construction locally, and this will probably afford a clue to the perpetrators.