A natural gas blast ripped through an apartment building in Russia's Tatarstan region early Wednesday, killing at least two people and leaving others feared trapped beneath the rubble, officials said. The explosion brought down an entire section of the three-storey brick building in Tatarstan's capital, Kazan. Russian television showed footage of the ruins _ a jagged remnant of a wall and a pile of rubble with smoke or steam wafting into the frigid air. One woman was found dead in the rubble and one of two people hospitalized, also a woman, died several hours later, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said. He said about 11 people could be trapped beneath the rubble.
