DAMASCUS: A tire from a bus of Iranian pilgrims exploded with force near a Shia shrine in Damascus on Thursday, killing three people, with Syria s interior minister dismissing reports of a terrorist attack.
It is not a terrorist act at all, Interior Minister Saeed Sammur told journalists at the scene. It happened while one of the empty bus tires was being repaired. An explosion took place as a result of the excessive pressure.
Two workers who were repairing the tire and the bus driver, who was standing near them, were killed in the explosion.
The minister said that, aside from the fatalities, there were no other casualties.
Mohamed Issa, director of the Khomeini Hospital in Sayeda Zeinab, where the explosion took place, said one of the dead was a 12-year-old boy who worked at the petrol station where the tire was being repaired.
Regional television channels had variously reported that the blast was caused by a bomb or an exploding gas cylinder packed in with the luggage of the pilgrims and had caused dozens of casualties.
Speculation centered on a possible terrorist attack, as the incident coincided with a visit to Damascus by Saeed Jalili, Tehran s chief nuclear negotiator and secretary of Iran s Supreme National Security Council.
Bomb attacks are rare in Syria, a country known for its iron-fisted security.
The explosion happened near a Shia shrine in the Sayeda Zeinab district that was the destination of the pilgrims. In September 2008, a car bomb there killed 17 people and wounded 14 in the deadliest such attack in more than a decade.
An AFP photographer said the explosion, which occurred around 8:30 am, severely damaged the engine compartment in the rear of the bus, broke windows and scattered debris over a radius of a dozen meters (yards).
The service station was about 500 meters from the shrine of Zeinab, who was the daughter of Shia martyr Ali and granddaughter of the Muslim Prophet Mohamed.
The shrine draws tens of thousands of people from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon each year, and the bus was bringing pilgrims from the northwestern Iranian city Ardebil.
