Authorities in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Sunday confirmed 15 people died and six were injured in an explosion at a fireworks plant on Saturday.

The accident was the worst amid a series of explosions since October 2005 in this township of Sijizi, Aohan Banner in Chifeng City.

The blast happened at about 10:13 a.m. on Saturday at the Xinxin Fireworks Plant in Sijiazi Township of Aohan Banner, killing 13 workers instantly and injuring six others, two seriously. It also destroyed about 50 workshops, a regional work safety bureau spokesman said.

Twenty-two workers at the site escaped unhurt.

The impact of the explosion was obvious. The corns in the field were all blown down, and the windows of many houses were shattered.

More than a full day after the explosion, smoke could still be seen belching from the remains of the plant, coupled with sporadic blasts of fireworks buried in the debris, according to local police.

Early on Sunday, rescuers found two more bodies in the debris, according to firefighters from Chifeng, a city in eastern Inner Mongolia, who participated in the rescue.

Fourteen of the dead, aged 25 to 68, were locals. The other wasfrom Chaoyang, a city in neighboring Liaoning Province. Of the dead, 11 were women.

A preliminary investigation found the blast occurred when some of the 43 workers were mixing ingredients for making fireworks inside the workshop.

The blast led to new rounds of explosions of oxidizers and reducing agents stored inside the weighing workshop, which triggered completed fireworks or semi-finished products kept in other workshops to explode.

The fatal accident was caused because the firework plant and its workers seriously violated relevant regulations and operation rules, the spokesman said.

Two shareholders in the fireworks plant were placed under police surveillance.

Aohan, with a history of 100 years in fireworks manufacturing, has been diligently trying for years to build itself into the biggest center for production and marketing of fireworks in north China.

Sijiazi township, for instance, previously had 80 fireworks manufacturing businesses at its peak. It kept 43 of them after diverse rounds of rectifying measures in the past two years. The existing works were capable of churning out 300 million yuan (about 42.86 million U.S. dollars) in output value annually.

Repeated accidents, however, caused by factors such as lax supervision and serious violations of regulations had earned Aohan nothing but a place on the blacklists kept by government departments, including the State Administration of Work Safety.

(Xinhua News Agency September 1, 2008)