A massive blast at a military base in Cyprus of confiscated Iranian munitions killed at least 12 people on Monday and knocked out the island’s largest power station, officials said. Witnesses said metal rained down on a nearby motorway and the explosion was felt for miles around in the olive groves and small farming villages that surround the Evangelos Florakis navy base on the south coast.
Cyprus’s defence minister and army chief both resigned hours after the explosion, a government spokesman said. The Iranian armaments were the cargo from the Monchegorsk, a ship Cyprus intercepted in 2009 sailing from Iran to Syria in violation of U.N. sanctions on Iran. In Nicosia, the capital some 65 kms to the north east, residents were woken by power cuts. Communications in the popular holiday island was patchy, as mobile networks were jammed.
Military sources said they believed all 98 containers of the Iranian armaments — kept exposed in scorching temperatures — went up in the early morning blast which badly damaged the Vassilikos power plant. The facility, one of three in Cyprus and the newest, provides the Mediterranean island with half its electricity.
“We can’t assess the extent of the damage, but it’s a biblical disaster,” electricity authority spokesman Costas Gavrielides told Reuters. Photographs of the power station showed the outer walls of two large multi-storey buildings had been shredded by the explosion.
Lines of search and rescue workers walked through nearby olive groves. Cyprus’s defence minister and army chief resigned after a munitions dump blast that killed 12 people on Monday, a govt spokesman said. The explosion happened at a military base where confiscated Iranian arms were being held and shut down the island’s largest power station, the official Cyprus News Agency said.
