A gas attack in a home-supply store on one of the busiest shopping days of the year sickened scores of people yesterday in an incident that police called likely motivated by a commercial dispute or blackmail attempt.
Boxes containing timers wired to glass vials were discovered at the attack scene and three other stores in the same chain in Russia's second-largest city.
Seventy-eight people sought medical care: 66 were briefly hospitalized and sent home, officials said. Police said the store where the people were sickened hadn't opened for the day and all those affected were employees or police, ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Officials with the Maksidom home-supply chain, which sells furnishings, home-repair material and other domestic articles, said they had received recent threats that sales would be disrupted around New Year's, when Russians traditionally give holiday gifts.
Most efforts to undermine competitors' sales in Russia's sharp-elbowed free market take the form of negative advertising or damaging rumours. Business-related violence nonetheless remains a feature of the cutthroat capitalism that enveloped Russia following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The first reaction is that it is one of the competitors of this store chain," St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said in televised comments.
St. Petersburg police spokesman Vyacheslav Stepchenko said the gas appeared to be methyl mercaptan, which smells like rotten cabbage and is both naturally occurring and manufactured for use in plastics and pesticides. It rarely has long-lasting effects.
Employees at the branch where people were sickened said they heard a noise like a clap or pop before people smelled a garlicky odour and began to feel ill. Police called to the scene found a mechanism with a timer attached to shattered ampoules, and patients complained of nausea and vomiting, Stepchenko said.
He said a custodian at another branch discovered a suspicious box before opening time and found ampoules attached to wires and a timer inside. The woman inadvertently broke one of the ampoules and noticed a repulsive smell but was not sickened, he said.
Boxes with glass containers attached to timers were found in two other stores by employees who carried them outside and covered them with buckets; police explosives experts defused them, Stepchenko said.
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