Lom

There is 10cm of snow at Petrohan pass, the road has been cleaned and sand has been placed, the officer on duty at Montana District Road Administration told Radio FOCUS.

Road haulage workers have staged roadblocks on Danube Bridge 2, connecting Vidin in Bulgaria to Calafat in Romania, private NOVA TV broadcaster reports.

Protesters have moved to vent their anger at Romanian authorities, saying it takes hours to process their papers on the Romanian side.

Shipping in the Bulgarian section of the Danube has been prohibited, announced Captain Toni Todorov, director of river Supervision - Lom with the Marine Administration.

The order entered into force on Tuesday at 12:00 hrs.

Captain Todorov announced that all ships passing at the moment through the Bulgarian section must dock at the nearest port.

River Rusenski Lom, which passes through the village of Basarbovo near the Bulgarian town of Ruse, overflew on Thursday.

Two roads have been flooded, as a result of which the access to the rock monastery St Dimitar Basarbovski, has been cut, Darik radio reports.

One man was presumed dead and two women were severely injured by a blast at a Bulgarian fireworks and hunting ammunition factory on Friday.

According to BGNES news outlet, the explosion at the privately-owned factory in Maglizh, some 200 km east of Sofia, occurred around 1130 EET (0930 UTC).

The reasons for the blast were not immediately known.

Chief Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov has said experts from abroad will be hired to investigate the explosion at the Gorni Lom ammunitions plant on October 3.

The Midzhur factory was leveled to the ground by an explosion which killed 15 and wounded three people who were working there at the moment.

Human error is the most likely cause of the deadly blast in the Midzhur explosives factory in the village of Gorni Lom, which killed 15 people on October 1, said caretaker Interior Minister Yordan Bakalov.

According to Bakalov, some of the people, guilty of the blast are alive and have to be investigated.

There is not a single proof supporting the theory that the deadly blast that killed 15 people in the Midzhur explosives factory in Gorni Lom was a sabotage, said Chief Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov for the Focus news agency.

Tsatsarov also said the investigation was proceeding, checking all possible versions.

The managers of the Midzhur factory in the village of Gorni Lom is responsible for the deadly blast, which killed 15 people, the caretaker Minister of Labour and Social Policies Yordan Hristoskov told bTV.

According to him, the management was criminally reckless and ignored the instructions of the Labour Inspectorate and the Hazardous Devices Control (KOS) agency.

Iliyan Mihaylov, Mayor of the northwestern village of Gorni Lom, which was stricken by a deadly explosion at a privately-owned explosives plant, insisted that the factory had to keep functioning due to the staggering unemployment in the area.