A gas cylinder exploded late Friday at the hotel in the city of Beawar, in the western state of Rajasthan, reducing the venue to ruins and sparking a huge fire.

By Saturday evening officials said nine bodies had been found.

But the figure rose sharply Sunday as rescue teams, aided by the army, found nine more victims including women and children under rubble.

“So far 18 bodies have been recovered,” said Gaurav Goyal, a senior administrative official in Ajmer, the district where the blast occurred, about 200 kilometres from the state capital Jaipur.

“Five seriously injured people, with severe burn injuries, are being treated in hospital,” he told AFP.

Recovery teams were sifting through mangled heaps of concrete and steel, removing victims on stretchers covered with white sheets.

The blast all but levelled the three-storey hotel where a wedding was underway. Eyewitnesses told local broadcaster NDTV the explosion occurred as a chef tried to refill a cooking canister.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje visited survivors in hospital late Saturday and announced compensation of 200,000 rupees ($3,106) each for the families of the dead.

“The cylinder blast at the wedding ceremony at Beawar is nothing less than a nightmare,” she said on Twitter.

Domestic gas cylinder explosions are common in India, where safety standards are relatively poor. Reports of fatal accidents from cylinder blasts are frequent but mass casualties are unusual.

The official Xinhua news agency said the fire had erupted Saturday evening in part of the more than 1,300-year-old Jokhang temple, but was soon put out.

Images posted on social media of the blaze showed the eaved roof of a section of the building lit with roaring yellow flames and emitting a haze of smoke.

“The fire was quickly extinguished, there were no casualties and order is normal in the area,” said the state-run Tibet Daily, adding that Tibet’s top Communist party official Wu Yingjie had rushed to the scene.

Jokhang temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site which lies at the heart of old Lhasa.

The Barkhor — a bustling, shop-lined area surrounding Jokhang whose streets and square constitute one of the most important pilgrimage circuits for Tibetans — was temporarily closed after the fire but has been reopened, the state Xinhua news agency said Sunday.

Prominent Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser told AFP she was “very worried” about the state of the monastery.

“Tibetans consider Lhasa to be a sacred place, but Jokhang is a sacred place within that sacred place — the most sacred in all of Tibet,” she said. “Some people say it’s only because of Jokhang that the holy city of Lhasa exists at all.”

“No matter where they are in the world, Tibetans all wish to come to Lhasa to pray at Jokhang; it’s the wish of a lifetime. Many who make pilgrimage to Lhasa prostrating do so just to visit the temple,” she added.

The area has been the site of past protests against Beijing’s presence in Tibet.

On Twitter, which is blocked in China, Tibetans abroad noted that photos and posts about the blaze were quickly being censored.

Robert Barnett, a London-based Tibetologist, tweeted that sources in Lhasa “claim police have threatened anyone distributing pictures or unofficial news about the fire.”

– Home of a venerated icon –

The incident comes as Tibetans across the country are celebrating Losar, the traditional Tibetan New Year that began Friday, the same day as the Chinese lunar new year.

The temple had been closed to the public on Saturday, Xinhua reported, citing a schedule from local authorities from before the holiday began.

Jokhang monastery houses one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most venerated icons, the Jowo Shakyamuni — a statue believed to be one of just three crafted during the Buddha’s actual lifetime, depicting him at age 12.

It is also home to numerous other priceless cultural artifacts, including over 3,000 images of Buddhas, deities and historical figures as well as treasures and manuscripts, according to UNESCO.

Many murals and other items were damaged during the Cultural Revolution, but much of its wooden architectural structure had remained intact over the centuries despite countless renovations, said Woeser.

China has ruled Tibet since the 1950s, and has been accused of trying to eradicate its Buddhist-based culture through political and religious repression.

Beijing insists that Tibetans enjoy extensive freedoms and argues that it has brought economic growth to the region.

Foreign journalists are banned from visiting Tibet except on state-sponsored tours, as Beijing seeks to strictly control the narrative about the region, ranked the second-least free territory in the world after Syria by US think tank Freedom House.

In 2008, demonstrations by Tibetan monks in Lhasa degenerated into deadly violence targeting China’s majority Han ethnic group and the Hui, a Muslim minority.

Later that year, dozens of monks burst into Jokhang temple to interrupt a state-run foreign media press tour intended to showcase the region’s harmony and stability in the wake of the protests, accusing the government of lying.

More than 150 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against Beijing since 2009, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, headquartered in Washington.

As she watches her workers haul in this year’s harvest, the 35-year-old is in a triumphant mood, ascribing her victory over the seasonal scourge to advice received via the app about effective pesticide use.

This photo taken on December 27, 2017 shows farmers working in a rice field on the outskirts of Yangon. New smartphone apps are providing farmers with up-to-date information on everything from weather, climate change, crop prices to advice on pesticides and fertilisers. / AFP PHOTO 

“We used to just farm the way our parents showed us,” she told AFP, in her village of Aye Ywar west of Yangon.

“But after getting the app, I now see how we should be doing it… it’s better to use proper techniques rather than just working blindly.”

San San Hla is among a growing cohort of farmers who are turning to tech to address the knowledge gap in a country where two thirds of the workforce are employed in agriculture.

The sector accounts for some 28 percent of the country’s GDP, but yields are low with farmers cut-off from modern technology under decades of isolationist junta rule.

For people like San San Hla apps could be the answer.

They are providing farmers with up-to-date information on everything from weather, climate change, crop prices to advice on pesticides and fertilisers.

Chat forums are connecting farmers, allowing them to swap tips while experts are on hand to answer queries.

The “Green Way” app is the brainchild of two former agricultural students, who in 2011 set up a website for farmers, often working through the night to keep it updated.

This photo taken on December 27, 2017 shows farmer San San Hla using a mobile app as she works in a rice field on the outskirts of Yangon. A free app on San San Hla’s smartphone is her new weapon in the war against the dreaded stem borer moth that blighted her rice paddy in southern Myanmar for the last two years. New smartphone apps are providing farmers with up-to-date information on everything from weather, climate change, crop prices to advice on pesticides and fertilisers. / AFP PHOTO

But at the time few farmers had internet access, recalls Yin Yin Phyu, 28, explaining the “idea just didn’t take off.”

Then smartphones arrived and everything changed.

As Myanmar opened its doors, telecoms companies rushed in to grab market share, thrusting Myanmar beyond the era of desktop computers and old-style mobile phones.

The cost of sim cards, once the tightly-controlled reserve of the well-connected, or special branch spies, plummeted from an unattainable $3,000 in 2005 to $1.50 in 2013.

Competitors practically gave away smartphone handsets as they fell over themselves to build up brand loyalty.

Mobile penetration stood at just seven percent in 2012. By the end of 2017, smartphone penetration had rocketed to 80 percent.

A nascent tech hub followed and outside of agriculture, apps were created for everything from healthcare to Myanmar’s parliament.

Farmers, many among the country’s poorest, today find themselves with a mobile computer in their hands — a game-changer for the entrepreneurs behind ‘Green Way,’ who launched their app in 2016 and now employ 18 full-time staff.

“‘Green way’ is my dream to link farmers and experts,” Yin Yin Phyu told AFP. “The farmers can get help whenever they need.”

Some 70,000 farmers have already downloaded the app although she hears far more are accessing it through phone-to-phone sharing.

– Field work –

Greater productivity at Myanmar’s farms could reshape both its economy and society, says 71-year-old agricultural expert Myo Myint.

“Many workers migrate to other countries because they can’t make enough money to live from agriculture in Myanmar,” he says.

“Farmers need technology and investment.”

A 2017 World Bank study found farmers in some areas of the country still earn as little as $2 per day.

Productivity is also relatively low with only 23kg of rice paddy generated in one day of work in Myanmar compared to 62kg in Cambodia, 429kg in Vietnam, and 547kg in Thailand.

The founder of the “Golden Paddy” app says the new tech is not best suited to struggling farmers at the bottom of the ladder.

They do not have the time or resources to implement advice on changing seeds or fertiliser.

Instead, the apps are aimed at smallholder farmers to allow them to “become a little more commercial,” Dutchman Erwin Sikma explains.

Similar projects in other developing countries – in India and parts of Africa – are still reliant on old-style phones and information by SMS.

Myanmar now has the chance to leapfrog that era to become an agricultural trailblazer.

But that also means the country is in uncharted territory.

“We have a lot of first-mover disadvantages,” Erwin Sikma says.

“It’s a start-up in a completely new model in a completely new market or economy so we need all the help we can get.”

Sabio, who describes himself as penniless and on the run, said he had received death threats from Duterte supporters on social media after filing a petition with the Hague-based International Criminal Court in April last year.

“I’m in a state of constant paranoia because I fear for my life,” Sabio, 51, told AFP in an interview. “It could be very possible that a bullet will hit me.”

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda launched a “preliminary examination” after receiving Sabio’s petition, which alleges around 8,000 extrajudicial killings, and this could lead to a full investigation by the court.

Sabio wants the president arrested.

Duterte won a landslide victory in 2016 elections largely on a pledge to eradicate drugs. He is accused of stoking the killings with inflammatory statements and repeated promises to pardon any police officer charged with murder.

Police say they have killed 4,021 drug suspects in self-defence, but rights groups claim police and shadowy vigilantes have actually killed more than 12,000 people.

Duterte maintains he is beyond the ICC’s jurisdiction and has threatened to withdraw his country from the treaty that created it if the tribunal pursues a formal investigation.

“The problem with me is when I see something wrong I fight,” said Sabio, who had a low-key legal practice for two decades and unsuccessfully ran for public office twice.

“Now to the question of how it feels to be standing against Goliath, to me the fact that he is president, I’m sorry to say this, doesn’t matter to me.”

– ‘Treacherous –

The unassuming lawyer — the son of public school teachers of modest means — lost the 2010 election for mayor of a southern town and was disqualified for being a “nuisance” senatorial candidate in 2016, officially ruled as lacking funds to run his campaign.

But his life started to change course when in October 2016 he agreed to represent Edgar Matobato, a self-confessed assassin whose deposition forms part of the ICC case.

Matobato had spectacularly confessed at a Senate public hearing a month earlier that he was a member of the “Davao Death Squad” that killed at least a thousand people on Duterte’s orders when the president was mayor of Davao city.

The lawyer alleged in the suit that the drug war was the “Davao Death Squad” on a national scale, which Duterte rejects.

“It is targeting a vulnerable civilian population, composed mostly of the poor living in depressed communities,” Sabio said.

“The only way to stop the killings is to issue a warrant of arrest. Arrest president Duterte and bring him to The Hague.”

Sabio, a short, stocky man with an unruly moustache, has feared for his life ever since and he left his southern home city of Cagayan de Oro for his own safety a year ago — the last time he saw his 75-year-old mother.

His assassins could be “riding in tandem” he said, referring to gunmen on motorcycles, said by witnesses to be behind many of the unsolved street murders of known small-time drug dealers.

Responding to questions about the threat against Sabio, Duterte’s spokesman Harry Roque said Tuesday the president bore no “ill will” against the lawyer.

“Let’s make sure that if there’s a threat, he should report it to the police,” Roque told reporters.

However, Sabio hit back Friday, saying “these people are treacherous”.

He said he does not know Duterte personally and denied working for the opposition, taking on the case purely on principle.

But Sabio does not look like a crusader and is battling myriad health problems including diabetes and heart disease — twice going under the knife, the last in mid-2016, to insert six stents for clogged blood vessels.

He still owes the hospital 900,000 pesos (more than $17,000), and when he flew to the Netherlands to file the case “I had no money so people contributed for my plane ticket, and also for my hotel”.

Since leaving Cagayan de Oro, he has missed doctors’ appointments as well as meetings with other clients.

“I could have died in that operation,” Sabio said. “But I don’t know, I was brought to life and maybe this is my mission in life.”

The indictment — which includes the first charges laid by special counsel Robert Mueller for election interference — detailed a stunning operation launched in 2014 in a bid to sow social division in the US and influence American politics “including the presidential election of 2016.”

Mueller alleges that by mid-2016, the campaign — under the direction of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — became focused on boosting Trump and demeaning his rivals including Democrat Hillary Clinton.

It allegedly involved “hundreds” of people working in shifts and with a budget of millions of dollars. Three companies were also indicted.

Moscow dismissed the allegations as “absurd.”

According to the indictment, members of the group posed as US citizens on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, posting content that reached “significant numbers” of Americans.

The group was allegedly in contact with “unwitting” members of the Trump campaign, but had a broader “strategic goal to sow discord in the US political system.”

Content created by the group was retweeted by the president’s two eldest sons Don Jr and Eric, as well as other top campaign officials and members of Trump’s inner circle.

“There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity,” said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

He added that there was also no judgment on whether the campaign “altered the outcome.”

‘No collusion!’

Trump leapt on Rosenstein’s comments, claiming they vindicated his campaign team.

“Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president,” he tweeted.

“The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!”

The allegations are a double-edged sword for Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed claims of Russian interference as “fake news” and a “hoax” designed to take away from his election victory.

On one hand, they confirm Russia interference, but they also seem to clear his campaign of knowing involvement with at least a portion of Moscow’s efforts to influence the contest.

Russia is also suspected of hacking and leaking embarrassing Democratic emails.

Four Trump campaign officials, including his campaign manager Paul Manafort and his national security advisor Michael Flynn, have already been indicted as part of Mueller’s broader investigation.

Trump has publicly mulled firing the former FBI director and has repeatedly sought to influence his investigation through public warnings.

On Friday, Trump seemed to say that the new indictments should put an end to allegations of campaign collusion.

“It’s time we stop the outlandish partisan attacks, wild and false allegations, and far-fetched theories, which only serve to further the agendas of bad actors, like Russia,” he said in a subsequent statement issued by the White House.

Troll farm

The group was said to be based in Putin’s home town of Saint Petersburg, but some of the accused traveled to the United States for political intelligence gathering.

Stops included Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan — a pivotal state in the election — Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and New York, according to the indictment.

An unnamed Texas-based American political operative is said to have instructed them to focus on so-called “purple states” — which swing between Republican and Democratic control.

The group organized pro-Trump rallies in Florida, New York and North Carolina, but much of its work was focused on producing material that was damaging to Clinton and Trump’s Republican rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The group purchased ads on social media and other websites either “expressly advocating for the election of then-candidate Trump or expressly opposing Clinton,” the indictment said.

Other ads encouraged blacks and Muslims not to vote, and alleged voter fraud in several states.

Two of the firms are said to have Russian government contracts.

Known as Putin’s “chef,” Prigozhin runs a company that works for the Kremlin to cater at receptions. He has been photographed with the Russian president. His Concord group is already under US sanctions.

Prigozhin made light of the allegations, according to Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency.

“Americans are very impressionable people. They see what they want to see. I have great respect for them. I am not at all upset that I am in this list. If they want to see a devil, let them,” he said.

In carrying out the influence campaign, Prigozhin’s group is accused of buying US social security numbers and bank account numbers.

In a separate filing, Mueller indicted an American identified as Ricardo Pinedo for selling such information.

None of the 13 Russian suspects are in US custody.

“Thirteen people carried out interference in the US elections? Thirteen against the billion-dollar budgets of the special forces? Against the espionage and counter-espionage, against the newest developments and technologies?” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook.

“Absurd? Yes. But this is the modern American political reality.”