Six soldiers were killed and three injured in the Nizhny Novgorod region when ammunition they were unloading for destruction blew up on Wednesday, the Defense Ministry said.
“The injured have been taken to a garrison military hospital,” the ministry’s press service said.
The blast, which took place in the village of Mulino, is tentatively blamed on safety violations, a regional law enforcement source said. He could not elaborate. The area hosts a firing range and dozens of military units.
Military invesigators are working at the scene, a spokesman for the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office said.
The most destructive incident in the past few years took place at an ammunition depot Ashuluk in the Astrakhan Region on August 23 when an artillery shell accidentally blew up causing a series of other explosions. The blasts killed eight servicemen and injured about a dozen others.
In a separate incident, artillery shells began blowing up in the Udmurtian republic in June when a fire broke out at a local arsenal depot. A conscript died when trying to put out the fire and at least 28,000 people were evacuated from the area, with a hundred of them requesting medical aid.