A Turkmen blogger writing under the pseudonym Serdar Aytakov has been publishing accounts of the aftermath of the explosion in Abadan, Turkmenistan, on a blog at the independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. In a recent entry he describes desperate relatives in Abadan:
The most heart-rending scenes are taking place around the military units; soldiers happened to be in the zone of the greatest destruction. Soldier's mothers have begun coming there. From all over Turkmenistan. With the only purpose -- to learn whether their children are alive or not. They are not given any information. Periodically, they are chased away, and not allowed to gather together. There is alarm, but not yet grief, as there is still hope that someone has remained alive, is evacuated, in the hospital, somewhere else, but alive.
It is impossible to say how many of such mothers there are who dropped everything to go to Abadan. They are not allowed to assemble, and as a rule they are coming here not alone, but accompanied by relatives. They come and stand along the sides of the road, in the hope that the military will begin to release some information about the dead, wounded and evacuated. But the military is silent.
While officials admitted 2 soldiers and 13 civilians were killed, the fact that for three days they said there were no casualties at all means the public has no faith in the announcements.
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