CAIRO, Egypt, June 20 (AP)-Twenty persons were killed and forty-one wounded today by two heavy explosions in the Jewish quarter of Cairo’s bazaar district. The blasts were believed to have been accidental detonations of fireworks explosives.
Police found the bodies of eighteen persons in the wreckage of shattered houses. Two persons died later in hospitals.
The explosions occurred about 150 yards apart and within three minutes of each other. They destroyed five houses and damaged about twenty others.
Saleh Murtaga Bey, Sub-Chief of Public Security, said tonight that investigations thus far had indicated the blasts had been accidental and had been caused by faulty storage of materials used by Jews in the manufacture of fireworks and noise-making torpedoes.
Earlier the Egyptian Government explored the possibility that the explosions had been planned. Three hundred policemen surrounded the quarter. An Interior Ministry official said that police had arrested seven Jewish boys with a pushcart bearing an unattached time fuse and explosives. A police commander said that two pushcarts loaded with unexploded gelignite had been discovered.
The Jewish boys, Murtaga Bey said, probably feared the gelignite would explode and were removing it or feared that their establishment would be searched. He said the two loads had not been intended to explode and had not been fused. The boys, he added, were the only persons arrested in the investigation.
He said that guards reported that no one had entered the district during the night, indicating explosives had not been brought in from outside.
He said that although he was convinced the explosions were accidental, police still were making inquiries regarding five Moslems who lived in a Jewish-owned house where the first blast had centered. Their bodies were not found among the ruins.
Premier Mahmoud Fahmy Nokrashy Pasha told newsmen- “It has been proved that the explosions in the Jewish quarter came from inside the houses and not from the outside. That is why only a few houses were destroyed. If the explosions had come from outside the houses the whole district might have been destroyed.”