Jalalabad, Afghanistan ? A preliminary investigation shows a warehouse explosion that devastated a neighborhood and killed at least 14 people in this eastern Afghan city was an accident and not an act of terror, the Afghan foreign minister said Saturday.

The head of the construction company that owned the warehouse said the building housed stocks of explosives for road-building.

Foreign Minister Abdullah, meeting with reporters in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said authorities would look at what negligence may have been involved. “There might have been some mistakes in maintaining the amount of explosives that were kept in reserve in that building,” he said.

In addition to the dead, about 90 people were reported injured in the blast.

Abdullah’s statements followed 24 hours of persistent speculation among police and military officials here that the warehouse might have been blown up by terrorists in order to damage a nearby hydroelectric dam and the Jalalabad power system. The theories reflected the general nervousness about terrorism in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The thunderous blast at midday Friday destroyed about 50 surrounding houses and damaged hundreds of others in western Jalalabad, and damaged the power system of the Darunta hydroelectric dam, just 200 yards from the warehouse, knocking out city power until repairs were completed early Saturday.

All that remained of the Afghan Construction and Logistics Unit warehouse was piles of brick and machinery. Houses in all directions were leveled or burned by the blast, and windows were blown out as far as a mile away.

The explosion also blew out windows and doors at a nearby Jalalabad University building, and students and staff members were among the injured.

Although national television late Friday reported a death toll of 25, police and hospital officials told The Associated Press 13 people had died, and a 14th body was reported discovered Saturday in the blast area.

The company director, Mohammad Karim, told The Associated Press the facility housed 20 pounds of a manufactured explosive, Vibox seemingly too little to cause such devastation. But he also said an unspecified amount of urea, a fertilizer material that can be used to make explosives, was stored at the warehouse.

“I don’t have any information about this explosion, whether it was a terrorist attack or not,” he said by telephone from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Later Saturday, however, Foreign Minister Abdullah was more definitive.

“So far the results of the investigations which have been carried out by the local authorities as well as people who were sent from here shows that it has been an accident,” Abdullah said in Kabul, 70 miles west of here.

“Whether proper care was taken or attention paid in order to provide security of the explosives that is something we have to look at,” Abdullah said.