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World|life|April 26, 2016 / 02:35 PM
Rare deadly blast hits Armenian capital

AKIPRESS.COM - image3 A large explosion tore through a bus in the center of the Armenian capital Sunday evening, killing two people and injuring eight. Police reportedly said afterward that initial investigations indicated the blast was likely to have been a terrorist attack, according to International Business Times.

Body parts were still lying dozens of yards from the bus three hours after the explosion, which took place just before 10 pm local time. A large part of the roof of the bus was blown over a nearby block of apartments, falling to the ground about 75 yards from the gutted vehicle.

“It was a very large explosion and all the windows shook,” said Nelson Avartyan, a local resident who was asleep in his apartment overlooking the site of the explosion.

He immediately went outside to find out what happened. “I didn’t even want to look... I saw one body and then they took the rest away,” he said. Dozens of windows in nearby buildings were blown out.

Terrorism in Yerevan is extremely rare and confirmation of an attack would mark a serious escalation in the strategic South Caucasus. But shock waves rippled through the region earlier this month as Armenia became embroiled in deadly fighting with its neighbor Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The explosion took place near the center of Yerevan, less than half a mile from the site of a memorial to the Armenian genocide and a conference hall complex where Hollywood A-lister George Clooney awarded a new humanitarian prize just 24 hours earlier.

A bomb was placed under one of the seats and the blast was caught on CCTV cameras, Armenian media reported the country’s chief of police as saying several hours after the incident.

All 10 people on the bus at the moment of the blast were reportedly either injured or killed. The driver of the vehicle survived the blast – suggesting it originated in the middle of the bus.

The incident comes at a highly sensitive time for landlocked Armenia, which has not experienced any major terrorist incidents since the 1990s.

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