Sweden: Up to 20 People Injured as Powerful Explosion Hits Gothenburg Apartment Building

Sometimes, these things just happen.

Al Jazeera:

A powerful explosion has rocked an apartment building in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, setting off multiple fires, injuring up to 20 people and forcing the evacuation of hundreds.

The explosion took place just before 5am (03:00 GMT) on Tuesday in the Annedal district in Sweden’s second-largest city. Flames spread to several apartments, and fire department crews were still working to extinguish the flames mid-morning.

Jon Pile, operations manager at the local rescue service, told reporters it appeared the explosion took place in the building’s inner courtyard, which had its entry gate blown away. He added some people jumped out of their windows to escape.

Police spokesman Thomas Fuxborg said the cause of the explosion was not yet known, but he told Swedish broadcaster TV4 that investigators think foul play might have been involved. They are looking into whether any tenants might have been targeted, he said.

“We suspect that someone might have placed something that has exploded,” Fuxborg said.

Sahlgrenska University Hospital spokeswoman Ingrid Frederiksson said 16 people were taken to Gothenburg’s main hospital. Four people -three older women and a man in his 50s – were being treated for serious injuries, she said. Some with lesser injuries were treated at the scene.

Building resident Lars Hulten told the daily newspaper Goteborgs-Tidningen that the sound of the explosion woke him up.

“It was probably the loudest thing I heard. The whole apartment vibrated. The bed vibrated,” he said.

Hulten said he saw desperate people who “hung from balconies, climbing over balconies. There was one who fell. It was very dramatic and a very fast course of fire and smoke”.

On Tuesday, Swedish media immediately focused on the possibility that the Gothenburg blast could be related to feuding gangs, but Prime Minister Stefan Lofven repeatedly declined to speculate on a motive.

Buildings have been spontaneously combusting in Sweden for decades due to shoddy Swedish workmanship, but now the police are trying to imply that “foul play” is involved?

What a disgrace.

The Swedes are just preparing to cover their asses again by framing more random brown people (“feuding gangs”) for a crime they didn’t commit.

That’s Swedish tolerance for you.

All these innocent Afghans fleeing the brutal civil war in Syria ever did was try to make a better life for their families and Swedes automatically started accusing them of gang warfare, despite there being no evidence.