Article from: The Australian

YEVPATORIA, Ukraine: At least 19 people were killed and 15 were still missing after an explosion ripped through an apartment block in a Ukrainian Black Sea resort town.

Rescuers and residents were desperately searching the wreckage for survivors after the explosion struck a five-storey residential building in the Crimean Black Sea town of Yevpatoria late on Christmas Eve.

Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry spokesman Igor Krol said 19 people were killed and 15 were still missing.

So far, 21 people had been rescued, he said.

Emergency workers were regularly maintaining periods of complete silence so they could hear the voices of those still trapped under the rubble.

Two sections of the apartment building, constructed in 1965 and containing 35 units, were destroyed in the explosion.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who have been engaged in a ferocious political row recently, were both on their way to the scene, their offices said.

Ms Tymoshenko had set up a special committee to deal with the rescue effort, her office said in a statement. The cause of the blast was not immediately clear, with the authorities refusing to confirm it was a gas explosion, the usual explanation for such incidents in apartment buildings in the former Soviet Union.

"This was not gas. It was probably oxygen that exploded.

"We are hoping to clear away the debris today," Ukraine's Emergency Situations Minister Volodymyr Chandra told Ukrainian television.

Witnesses said the cries of those trapped under the rubble could still be heard, giving rise to hopes that more survivors could be found.

The Ukraine Emergencies Ministry said that it had about 300 rescuers already on the scene.

Mobile phones were being used to try to locate survivors.

Television pictures showed rescuers attempting to uncover survivors by pulling away the huge concrete blocks, which were all that remained of the section of the building that exploded.

Yevpatoria is a popular summer resort town in Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, 60km west of regional capital Simferopol.

Explosions in ageing and poorly maintained Soviet-era apartment buildings, usually caused by gas, are not unusual in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union.

In October last year, 15 people were killed in a gas explosion that partially destroyed a nine-storey building in Ukraine's eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk.