Gas leak caused deadly blast in China Olympic city

BEIJING: A gas leak caused an explosion this week that killed 23 people in a northern Chinese city that will host part of the 2022 Winter Olympics, authorities said yesterday.

The blast in the small hours of Wednesday in the city of Zhangjiakou, some 200 kilometres northwest of Beijing, also injured 22 people.

“Initial investigations have shown that the explosion was caused by a gas leak from the Hebei Shenghua Chemical Co of ChemChina,” Zhangjiakou mayor Wu Weidong told reporters.

“Vinyl chloride spread to the public road outside the factory and was ignited by an open flame.”

Authorities previously reported that a truck carrying combustible chemicals had blown up while entering a factory, igniting other nearby vehicles, but the cause of the explosion had not been known until now.

Thirty-eight trucks and 12 cars were also damaged in the explosion, which eyewitnesses say created a huge fireball that engulfed vehicles on an entire stretch of road.

The explosion occurred in the city’s Qiaodong district some 45 minutes away from Chongli, which will host some of the mountain sport competitions during the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. Industrial accidents are common in China, where safety regulations are often poorly enforced.

In 2015, giant chemical blasts in a container storage facility killed at least 165 people in the northern port city of Tianjin. — AFP PARIS: A senior French civil servant, Benoit Quennedey, has been charged with treason and spying for North Korea, a judicial source said.

Quennedey, a senior administrator in France’s upper parliament chamber, the Senate, and president of the Franco-Korean Friendship Association, was taken into custody late Sunday.

He was charged with “treason for passing on information to a foreign power,” a judicial source said, adding that he had been barred from leaving the country or continuing his work in the Senate.

He is being held at the headquarters of France’s DGSI domestic intelligence agency on the outskirts of Paris.

The Senate said earlier that he had been suspended from his job as an administrator in the department of architecture, heritage and gardens and that his office had been searched by police.

Quennedey has travelled extensively throughout the Korean peninsula, according to the website of his publisher Delga.

In a video posted on YouTube, he described impoverished, isolated North Korea as a ‘model for development’, praising citizens’ free access to education and health care.

“I’ve been there seven times since 2005, and in North Korea, you notice it, there’s no litter on the ground,” he says in the video. — AFP