Bucharest - Romania yesterday denied accusations that a cyanide spill which has devastated a river in neighbouring Hungary amounted to a second Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear disaster.
"You can absolutely not compare this incident, absolutely regrettable as it is, to the Chernobyl catastrophe," said Bucharest's Environment Minister, Mr Romica Tomescu.
"I hope that international bodies will analyse this accident properly, and draw the correct conclusions," he added as Hungarians continued to pull dead fish from the Tisza river.
According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, (WWF), the spill of over 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-tainted water from a reservoir near Baia-Mare in northern Romania two weeks ago "ecologically killed" a vast stretch of waterways in Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia.