Candles mark Chernobyl anniversary

Slavutych (Ukraine), Apr 26: Mourners bearing candles marked the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster today, honouring those who died from its effects as leaders pledged to ensure it would never happen again.

Hundreds of people, each bearing a candle, some with red carnations, filed slowly through the streets of Slavutych, the town built to house the Chernobyl plant's workers after the world's worst nuclear accident on April 26, 1986.

At 1:23 am Moscow time (2123 GMT) -- a minute before the time of the explosion and subsequent fire that sent radiation billowing throughout Europe -- a minute of silence was declared.

A bell tolled and alarm sirens blared.

A middle-aged man, tears welling in his eyes, shook his head in disbelief as he stood alongside younger mourners.

President Viktor Yushchenko was due to place flowers an hour later at a church honouring ''liquidators'' who died fighting the blaze or later from excessive doses of radiation.

The blast in Chernobyl's fourth reactor -- during an unexplained experiment -- contaminated large swaths of territory in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Soviet authorities took two days to inform the world -- and their own people. They then launched feverish clean-up and reconstruction efforts culminating in the construction of a structure to house the shattered reactor about 80 km (50 miles) north of Kiev.

The Slavutych procession moved to a memorial, with mourners placing candles at the foot of a wall bearing images graved in stone of engineers and firefighters sent to tackle the blaze.

Estimates of the death toll linked to Chernobyl vary widely.

The World Health Organisation put at 9,000 the number of extra deaths, while the environmental group Greenpeace predicts an eventual death toll of 93,000.

Hundreds of thousands were evacuated and the United Nations estimates 7 million still live on land with unsafe radiation levels.

Reuters