A total of 10 people have been registered as injured in the incident in which an ammunition depot exploded near the city of Sliven in Southeastern Bulgaria Tuesday afternoon.

The number of the injured in the blasts has thus grown, with three more hospitalized in the city of Yambol Tuesday night.

Thus, a total of nine people have been admitted to the hospital in Yambol, and one is in the hospital in the other close-by city of Sliven. The initial reports put the total number of injured at 7, of whom two were in a critical condition.

The blasts at the ammo site near the Petolachkata road junction close to Sliven occurred at 2:40 pm on Tuesday, injuring at least 7 people, two of them critically. The facility in question is the property of a Sofia-based firm, Bereta Trading, which uses it to dismantle munitions – including shells from the Chelopechene military depot near Sofia that exploded in July 2008.

As the explosions at the Bereta Trading depot continued into the evening, the authorities moved to evacuate the 630 residents of Gorno Alexandrovo, while also considering the evacuation of another nearby village, Lozenets.

According to Prof. Nikolay Miloshev, Director of the Geophysics Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the blasts near Sliven caused an earthquake with a magnitude of 1.5 on the Richter Scale.

His statement came early Tuesday night, after earlier the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences announced it had registered no earthquake that might have caused the blasts. Meanwhile, the blasts did cause panic among the local population, with the people mistaken the explosions for an earthquake in the wake of the 5.8-6.0-magnitude earthquake that jolted Sofia and Western Bulgaria on May 22, 2012.