Mexico prepared to turn the bodies of five Canadian tourists over to their relatives as six people recovered from wounds suffered in a mysterious blast at a Caribbean coast hotel, where inspectors from the army, navy and civil defense agencies combed through the rubble looking for clues in the accident that also killed two Mexican hotel employees. Experts and officials differed over whether the sprawling luxury hotel complex was in fact a palm-fringed Caribbean coastal time bomb, accumulating swamp gas since it was built four years ago over a mangrove thicket.
Quintana Roo state attorney general Francisco Alor said investigators believe the explosion at the Grand Riviera Princess resort was produced by gases from rotting vegetable matter or waste trapped beneath the ground floor of the building where the blast occurred.