* 12 dead, 62 injured in blast * EAC appeals to cut down consumption *
The defence minister of Cyprus and the army chief resigned Monday after a munitions dump blast killed 12 people at dawn and knocked out the island’s largest power station, causing widespread power cuts.
The explosion happened at a military base where confiscated Iranian munitions were being held for the past three years.
"The explosion occured in material held since 2009 by the Republic from an Iranian vessel which was sailing to Syria… there are 12 dead and 62 injured," government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou said.
He said that defence minister Costas Papacostas and National Guard chief Petros Tsalikidis handed in their resignations to President Demetris Christofias.
There was no immediate word on the identity of those killed in the blast. Stefanou said the victims were all Cypriots.
The Iranian armaments were in the cargo of the Monchegorksk, a Russian-owned ship intercepted off the coast of Cyprus in 2009 after pressure from the U.S., sailing from Iran to Syria in violation of U.N. sanctions on Iran.
Military sources said they believed all 98 containers of the Iranian arms, kept exposed in scorching temperatures, exploded.
The intensity of the blast caused extensive damage to property nearby and to a popular tourist resort 3 km away, where windows and doors of beachside restaurants were blown out.
Stefanou declined to give details on the storage conditions of the material, but said there had been a meeting on the issue last week.
Press reports suggested that a recent assessment found the material to be in a “critical state”.
There were also scores of injured at the Evangelos Florakis base near Zygi, half-way between the coastal cities of Limassol and Larnaca.
The explosions threw debris onto the highway several hundred metres away, injuring some motorists.
"It looks like a bombed-out landscape," a witness told Sigma television, with other reports describing the area as an enormous crater.
The explosion knocked out Vasilikos, the island's largest power station with a production capacity of 860MW.
"We can't assess the extent of the damage, but it's a biblical disaster," Costas Gavrielides, spokesman for the state-run electricity authority told Reuters.
The EAC has appealed to consumers to cut down their consumption of electricity to the bare minimum, as Vasilikos is out of use and the auxiliary power station at Dhekelia has reached its output capacity, generating 460MW. Many rural areas remain without electricity.
An alternative power station at Moni, several kilometres west of Vasiliko had been scaled down to 330MW and recently decommissioned.
