Via Star Tribune:
Fourteen people were injured, six critically, early Wednesday morning after an explosion caused a major fire at a grocery store and apartment building in the bustling Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in south Minneapolis.
Minneapolis Fire Chief John Fruetel said they do not know yet if all the residents are accounted for. Some made it out on their own into the subzero temperatures, but others had to be rescued with ladders.
Mohamed Cheikhabdi, head of the Somali Advocate Justice Center, said that family members have reported that three individuals living in the apartments are not in the hospital and have not been accounted for. They are worried that they may have died in the fire, he said.
Asked if anyone had been found inside, Fruetel said water was still being poured on the building and firefighters have not yet been able to enter. Fire investigators are on the scene, and city inspectors are assessing the structural integrity of the building, he said.
Police are interviewing victims at the hospital.
So to sum up, the explosion was in a building with 10 apartments reportedly occupied principally by single Somali men, and a community Halal sharia-compliant grocery store on the first floor. Next door was the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque and cultural center. The utility company appears to have ruled out a gas leak. The building was just inspected in 2012 and had no reported problems.
A witness in the building describing the explosion talks of an initial electrical “shock” feeling in the building, then a subsequent explosion that blew the windows out on the second floor. Investigators have yet to get fully into the building to determine the cause.
The firemen noted how this explosion/fire was unlike anything they had ever seen, that it included a man who apparently went out the window who had no legs, which if he wasn’t already in that condition, suggests that his legs were blown off.
The Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque next door appears to promote Sharia law, and links on its website to the Muslim Brotherhood website, as well as to INSA and CAIR. It caters to a Somali immigrant Muslim community.
There is no link established between the explosion and the mosque at this time.
The Somali community in Minnesota has lost several young men to jihad in Somalia. Just today, there was a bombing, killing 10, at the popular Jazeera Hotel in Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab took credit, saying they had warned Somalis against New Years celebrations or consorting with “infidels”.
We shall have to wait for further facts to see what the cause was in this case, but initial reports don’t seem to point to an obvious building problem.