Yemen - A massive explosion has jolted the southern Yemeni city of Taiz, leaving more than a dozen people dead and several others wounded.

The blast occurred around 5 a.m. local time (0200 GMT) on Tuesday in the second largest city in the impoverished Arab nation, killing at least eighteen people.

Fifteen people were also injured in the pre-dawn explosion which reduced a three-storey building with six residential apartments to rubble and ripped through two adjacent homes.

"We think it was dynamite," a local official told Reuters, saying the explosives apparently belonged to a Yemeni businessman and contractor who used explosives in road construction.

Yemeni authorities launched an investigation into the cause of the blast, which based on initial findings did not seem to be anything other than an accident, the official said.

The oil-rich yet impoverished nation has been the scene of relentless violence since a Western-backed campaign began to wipe out various Al-Qaeda cells in the Arabian Peninsula which Washington blamed for a Christmas Day attempted bombing on a Detroit-bound plane.

Until very recently, the country's North was also the scene of a massive offensive by the Yemeni-Saudi armies who tried to crush the Shia Houthi fighters. The Houthis blame the Sunni-dominated central government for discrimination against the country's Shia minority.

Yemen is also facing a mounting separatist sentiment in the South with tensions hiking over what the southerners view as Sana'a's economic and political marginalization of the once independent South.

MRS/TG/DT

Originally published in Press TV