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AFP | Rome

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A huge explosion at a petrol station in a Rome suburb yesterday injured nearly 30 people, two of them seriously, and rattled windows across the Italian capital.

The blast around 8:20am (0620 GMT) was preceded by a fire caused by a gas leak during refuelling, according to Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, who provided the toll of injured.

Gualtieri visited the charred and smoking remains of the petrol and liquified natural gas (LNG) station and an adjacent sports centre in the Prenestino neighbourhood of eastern Rome. The explosion sent a fireball and thick black smoke into the air, and was heard on the other side of Rome, shaking windows and causing some residents to worry that a bomb had gone off.

“The explosion was really powerful. I felt my skin burning,” Michele Secu, a 23-year-old who worked at the now-destroyed sports centre, said.

Before the explosion, emergency services and police were called to investigate the gas leak and had evacuated the immediate area, including a children’s summer camp. Police said 10 of their officers and one member of the fire service were injured, in addition to 16 civilians, two of whom were in a serious but not life-threatening condition.

Fabio Balzani, head of the sports centre, said if the fire had occurred just a bit later it could have been disastrous, with 60 children expected at the camp and around 120 people booked to use the pool.

“It would have been a massacre, a catastrophe,” he told AFP. Andrea Quattrocchi, the local chief of the Carabinieri police force, said the timely intervention of his team was crucial.

“They extracted a person alive from a burning car,” who was taken to hospital and is in a serious but stable condition, Quattrocchi told reporters.