Reds lay claim to hotel blast

Left-Wing activists have claimed responsibility for a minor explosion at a hotel in Davos, close to where top business executives and world leaders were meeting, but nobody was hurt.

LEFT-WING activists claimed responsibility for a minor explosion yesterday at a hotel in Davos, close to where top business executives and world leaders were meeting, but nobody was hurt.

Devin Wenig, CEO of Thomson Reuters' Markets division, was in a breakfast meeting of senior executives at the hotel when the explosion happened.

"A huge boom went off. The whole ceiling lifted. Everyone was convinced it was a bomb," he said. "It took a half hour to reassemble the meeting."

Participants were later told that a boiler had exploded, he added. The Forum's main programme was not disrupted.

"I can confirm that there has been an explosion in a storage room in the basement of the hotel," Thomas Hobi, a spokesman for the local police, said. "There has been minor damage but nobody was injured." Swiss prosecutors said they were investigating the explosion, implying that there might be a criminal motive, but they declined to give further details.

A Reuters photographer said a few police were patrolling outside the building and he could see a broken window but no other damage.

A group calling itself Revolutionary Perspective said in a statement on an activist website it had targeted the luxury Posthotel with a firebomb and said Swiss ministers and representatives of top bank UBS were staying there.

"Our fight against the dictatorship of capital is focused on the social alternative to capitalism: communism," the group said in the statement.