Gas leak blast in Cuban hotel kills 27

HAVANA－Rescue crews worked through a second night searching for victims of a hotel explosion that killed at least 27 people in Cuba's capital and left more than a dozen missing.

Hotel Saratoga, a luxury 96-room hotel in Old Havana, was finishing renovations when an apparent gas leak sparked a massive explosion on Friday.

Just steps from Cuba's capitol, Saratoga's facade was sheared off, burying workers inside and apparently passersby outside under concrete and twisted metal. The explosion happened in the late morning when the streets and plaza in front of the stately hotel would have been full of pedestrians.

On Saturday evening Julio Guerra Izquierdo, chief of hospital services at the Ministry of Health, announced that the death toll had risen to 27, with 81 people injured. The dead included four children and a pregnant woman. Spain's President Pedro Sanchez said via Twitter that a Spanish tourist was among the dead and that another Spaniard was seriously injured.

Thirty-seven people were in hospital, the Health Ministry said.

Earlier on Saturday afternoon, a representative of Grupo de Turismo Gaviota SA, which owns the hotel, said 13 of its workers were missing. Governor Reinaldo Garcia Zapata said on Saturday evening that 19 families had reported loved ones missing and that rescue efforts would continue.

No survivors were found in the upper floors of the hotel, and rescuers said they were now concentrating their efforts on the jumbled debris filling the two-level basement of the neoclassical building.

Authorities said the cause of the explosion was still under investigation, but believed it to have been caused by a gas leak. A large crane was seen hoisting a charred gas tanker out of the rubble on Saturday.

The hotel was renovated in 2005 as part of the Cuban government's revival of Old Havana and is owned by the Cuban military's tourism business arm, Grupo de Turismo Gaviota SA.

The explosion is another blow to the country's crucial tourism industry. Even before the pandemic kept tourists away from Cuba, the country was struggling with tightened sanctions imposed by former US president Donald Trump and kept in place by the Joe Biden administration. These measures limited visits by US tourists to the islands and restricted remittances from Cubans in the US to their families in Cuba.

Agencies Via Xinhua