Blasts and fire raged for the second day Friday at the armaments depot as local residents scrambled for cover. Five people have been confirmed dead, and scores have been injured, many losing their homes.

The base stored old arms that were pulled back by the Soviet Union from East Germany after it completed its reunification with West Germany in 1990.

Ukraine's public prosecutor accused officers overseeing the site of negligence. It was the second such incident in just a few months.

Defense Minister Evhen Marchuk initially denied that a blast had occurred, before eye witnesses told reporters about the disaster and footage of it appeared on the news, according to reports.

Some 60 percent of the armaments were kept in the open air and all stored in a single heap -- against strict regulations that say they should be separated by a wall, embankment or other defense shield in case of just such an accident.

According to respected military expert Serhei Zhurets, Ukraine "has two million tonnes of Soviet-era armaments, some of which are no longer in functioning order and are waiting to be destroyed. But there is not enough money to do this."

In all, Ukraine inherited 184 munitions arms depots, much of it equipment that was pulled back from Warsaw Pact nations after the bloc's collapse.

Ukraine has returned all of its nuclear warheads to Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse under a deal that the United States helped broker and insisted upon, fearing instability in independent Ukraine.

But the safe upkeep of the massive load of arms here is still prompting fears in the West, mindful of Ukraine's reputation for corruption in a nation where a quarter of the population lives below the official poverty line.

In March, Defense Minister Marchuk admitted that several hundred Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles remained unaccounted for in Ukraine.

He said this must only be a case of bad bookkeeping and categorically dismissed the possibility of the missiles being stolen, even though Ukraine has been accused in recent years of delivering arms to nations like Iraq on the black market.

According to some analysts, contraband armaments in the region are also seeping in from the Transdnestr, a separatist and largely lawless region of eastern Moldova that has one of the largest munitions dumps in the former Soviet Union.

But the situation is not much safer in Russia itself, which has been hit by several military catastrophes in recent years.

The most dramatic was the August 2000 Kursk nuclear submarine disaster that claimed the lives of 118 seamen and was followed with horror across the world as its crew suffocated on the bed of the Barents Sea.

Last summer, a fire at a military base in the Siberian region of Buryatia killed two people, prompting the evacuation of several thousand.

Russia also has up to 40,000 tonnes of chemical weapons that it does not have the cash to eliminate despite signing an international agreement to do so within years.

Analysts and media report that arms are regularly stolen and re-sold by Russian officers, who receive miserly pay.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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