Pregnant woman and child among 22 killed in huge explosion at luxury hotel in Cuba
7 May 2022, 10:36 | Updated: 7 May 2022, 12:08
At least 22 people have died, including a pregnant woman and a child, in a huge explosion at a luxury hotel in Cuba.
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The blast tore through Havana's 96-room Hotel Saratoga in the downtown area of the capital on Friday.
Rescuers have been searching though the rubble to find more victims of the blast, with dozens injured at the five-star site, which once hosted Beyonce and Jay-Z, along with a number of other celebrities and dignitaries.
The hotel did not have any guests at the time of the explosion because it was undergoing renovations ahead of a planned reopening on Tuesday.
The cause of the explosion was due to a gas leak, President Miguel Diaz-Canel's office said.
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Mr Diaz-Canel said 50 adults and 14 children were hospitalised after the blast, and that families in buildings near the hotel affected by the explosion had been transferred to safer locations.
The government has not yet made public the nationalities of the victims, state TV said.
Pictures from the devastating incident show the now almost unrecognisable 19th-century structure severely damaged, with clouds of dust billowing into the sky.
The website Cubadebate reported that a school next door had been evacuated.
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Late on Friday evening relatives of missing people remained at the site as efforts continued to sift through the rubble.
Others gathered at hospitals where the injured were being treated.
Ms Avellar was waiting for news of Odalys Barrera, a 57-year-old cashier who has worked at the hotel for five years. She is the godmother of Ms Barrera's daughters and considers her like a sister.
Although no tourists were reported injured, the explosion is the latest blow to the country's crucial tourism industry.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic kept tourists away from Cuba, the country was already struggling with the sanctions imposed by former US president Donald Trump and kept in place the Biden administration.
The sanctions limited visits by US tourists to the islands and restricted remittances from Cubans in the US to their families in Cuba.
Tourism had started to revive somewhat early this year, but the war in Ukraine crimped a boom of Russian visitors, who accounted for almost a third of the tourists arriving in Cuba last year.
