Scores ill after gas attack in store
More than 70 people were sickened after gas was released today in a St Petersburg chain store and boxes with glass containers attached to wires were found in three other outlets of the same store.
Police said they believed a commercial dispute or blackmail attempt was behind the incidents, and Russian news agencies quoted the city’s top official as saying that authorities had ruled out terrorism.
Seventy-eight people sought medical care and 66 of them were taken to hospital, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.
City governor Valentina Matviyenko later said that all who sought medical help were sent home and were not suffering any ill effects.
Matviyenko said the incidents were not terrorism and that law enforcement authorities believed they were either a case of simple hooliganism or an effort to compromise a competitor, the Interfax and RIA-Novosti new agencies reported.
The gas was preliminarily determined to be methyl mercaptan, St Petersburg police spokesman Vyacheslav Stepchenko said.
Methyl mercaptan is a gas smelling like rotten cabbage that is both naturally occurring and manufactured for use in plastics and pesticides, the US Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says.
The agency’s website said little is known about the gas’s potential health effects. One person exposed to very high concentrations of the gas went into a coma and died, the website says.
Stepchenko said that a custodian at a branch of the Maksidom home-supplies chain found a suspicious box before the store’s opening and when she opened it, she found ampoules attached to wires and a timer. The woman inadvertently broke one of the ampoules and noticed a repulsive smell, but apparently was not sickened, he said.
All those who sought medical care were from another branch of the chain, Stepchenko said.
Boxes with glass containers attached to timers were found in two other stores by employees, who carried them outside and covered them with buckets; police explosives experts defused them, he said.
Officials of the store chain, which has outlets only in St Petersburg and sells furnishings, home-repair material and other domestic articles, had told police that they had received threatening letters in recent weeks, Stepchenko said.
The letters threatened to disrupt the company’ssales during the holiday gift-buying period, the managers said, according to Stepchenko. New Year’s Eve is a traditional gift-giving day in Russia.
