About seven houses and two shops were burnt in a fire, as five cylinders blew up one after the other at Govindpuri in south-east Delhi on Tuesday.

The shop owner, who ran a business of filling petromax mini gas cylinders, has been absconding since the incident.

While some eyewitnesses have told police that a cigarette being smoked by the shopkeeper led to the fire, others have blamed short-circuit for the incident.

However the police are not buying the cigarette story.

“If the shopkeeper was smoking a cigarette and that caused the fire, he too should have been injured”, a police officer associated with the probe, told Deccan Herald.
A case has been registered and police are looking for the owner, Raju.

No injuries have been reported in the incident. Eight fire tenders were needed to extinguish it and the entire operation took over two hours.

The officer said the large cylinder being used to fill the smaller ones must have started leaking.

Vehicles burnt

There were several large cylinders kept at the shop, which burst one after the other. The impact of the blast was such that several motorcycles and bicycles parked close to the shop were gutted down.

The electric wires too caught fire, which led to a power failure in the area for hours.
 Though the officer acknowledged that after the incident, several people in the area complained of “unauthorized” filling of cooking gas by shopkeepers, he said it was still a matter of investigation whether Raju’s business too, was unauthorized.