French factory blast 'an accident'

Authorities said dangerous materials were "stored without too many precautions"

PARIS, France -- France's Interior Ministry has said that an accident and not terrorism remains the most likely cause of an explosion that killed 29 people at a Toulouse petrochemicals plant.

The incident on September 21 at the AZF facility in the southwestern French city was initially considered suspicious as police began investigating the background of a 35-year-old contract worker found dead at the scene.

The ministry confirmed that French intelligence had made inquiries into Hassan Jandoubi, a French citizen of Tunisian origin, but said nothing troubling had been found.

"A lot has been exaggerated," a ministry spokesman told Reuters said on Friday.

"In an investigation of this nature, every trail has to be followed (but) at the present stage of the inquiry there is nothing to suggest it was anything other than an accident."

The explosion, 10 days after the hijacked airliner attacks on New York and Washington, also injured more than 3,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes in the surrounding area.

Le Parisien newspaper quoted the head of the investigation, magistrate Michel Berard, on Friday as saying he was inclined to believe that an accident caused the explosion at the plant, owned by oil giant TotalFinaElf.

The Toulouse prosecutor has said he is "99 percent" sure that the explosion at AZF was accidental.

"We will not enter into a cycle of irresponsibility," Mayor Philippe Douste-Blazy told the Associated Press on Thursday.

"I'd like the truth as soon as possible, but justice doesn't move at the same pace as politics, or news."

Slim build

Authorities have said the blast was sparked in a silo containing 300 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical that can be used in fertiliser or explosives.

Berard told the newspaper that the unit of the plant where ammonium nitrate exploded was "certainly a place where materials had been stored without too many precautions."

A source close to the probe said on Wednesday that witnesses told police Jandoubi had quarrelled with truck drivers before the blast over American flags they had in their cabs in sympathy with the victims of the U.S. attacks.

Suspicions were further aroused by an autopsy that showed he was wearing two pairs of trousers and four pairs of underpants.

Investigators have questioned Muslim clerics about Jandoubi's dress without result.

His relatives say he had a complex about his slim build and was not interested in religion.

"He was really skinny," Jandoubi's sister Liliane told Le Parisien. "Even when he was a boy, he always wore several pairs of underpants because he had a hang-up about being so slim."

Jandoubi's wife Nadia said her husband had never been religious.

"He wasn't interested in Islam. He knew hardly any verses from the Koran and couldn't read Arabic," she told Le Figaro newspaper in a report published on Friday.

French Environment Minister Yves Cochet on Thursday said the authorities had information which showed that the Toulouse explosion "could have a terrorist origin."

Cochet added, however, that investigators were not ruling out any potential cause "and obviously not that of an accident, whether because of a technical failure or because of a simple lack of vigilance."