12 dead in Doha gas blast - Gulf Today

DOHA: A gas tank on the roof of a restaurant exploded in the Qatari capital on Thursday, killing 12 people, mostly Asian and Arab customers, and injuring 31 others, the interior ministry said.

The blast, shortly after 10am, tore through the Istanbul restaurant, near the popular Landmark Mall in Doha and next to a petrol station, according to footage aired on Qatar Television.

“It was a huge explosion,” public security chief Major General Saad Bin Jassim Al Khleifi told a press conference, adding that the gas tank had caught on fire before it exploded. How the fire occured is being investigated.

“It blew away cars and the shrapnel scattered 50 or 100 metres away,” he said.

Earlier Qatar Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani, in remarks to state television, confirmed there had been an explosion.

The civil defence director of operations, Hamid Al-Duhaimi, said four people were found dead at the scene and the others died on their way to the hospital.

Footage showed paramedics carrying a covered body past rubble strewn some 50 metres from the building, whose roof had caved in.

And pictures posted on Twitter showed several damaged cars.A witness said police had cordoned off the area, and firefighters were busy clear debris.

The Ministry of Interior, which is responsible for police and emergency operations, said on its official Twitter feed that all roads leading to the scene have been shut down.

Hamad Medical Corp., which manages eight hospitals and the national ambulance service, put out a call for blood donations on social media shortly after the blast happened, saying it is in need of all types of blood.

Qatar TV aired pictures of damaged cars and smoke rising from near a gas station close to the shopping centre.

Injured bystanders were seen being wheeled to ambulances on stretchers while police officers examined the scene.

The incident was the deadliest in Qatar since May 2012, when at least 19 foreign nationals, including 13 children, were killed by a fire in an upscale shopping mall.

In a separate incident on Thursday, medics and security sources at the Hamad medical city in Doha said dozens of people were hurt in the afternoon due to a gas leak at a chemical plant in an industrial area near Doha.

They gave no figures or details on their condition, but said helicopters were despatched to fly victims of the leak to the Hamad medical centre quickly as ambulances had been caught in heavy traffic caused by the restaurant incident.

Agencies

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