Detectives were investigating yesterday whether a man found dead after an explosion that destroyed two cottages in North London was murdered.

Officers were treating the blast as suspicious and have evidence that it may have been set off deliberately, a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

Residents of Stanley Road in Harrow described hearing a loud explosion at 9.30pm on Wednesday as two buildings collapsed in the quiet cul-de-sac.

Paramedics pronounced one man dead at the scene and took two other people to hospital with serious injuries.

A gas leak was initially suspected as the cause of the explosion, but a spokesman for National Grid, which is responsible for the street’s gas supply, said that no trace of a leak had been found in the system.

After structural engineers had worked throughout yesterday to make the rest of the properties safe, firefighters were able to remove the man’s body just after 9pm.

Andrew Haynes, 44, a gravedigger, said that it took at least 15 minutes

to pull a 17-year-old girl from one property. He said: “There was a girl’s arm just poking through the rubble and there was a beam on her. It looked like the ceiling had fallen on her and she was entombed in there. I kept telling her she was going to be OK. She was covered in dust, she had lacerations on her stomach and she was in a pretty bad way.”

A 26-year-old man suffering from serious head injuries was taken to Northwick Park Hospital in northwest London. The 17-year-old girl, named locally as Charlotte, was taken to Chelsea and Westminster hospital with severe burns.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said that the police were treating the case as suspicious, adding that the inability to access the building had delayed the investigation.

Detectives from the Specialist Crime Directorate, which is responsible for the capital’s most serious criminal cases, are investigating.

Phil Redmond, who has lived in Stanley Road for ten years, came downstairs to discover that his front door had been blown off. “I feared for my life,” the courier company manager said. “I was just putting the kids to bed. The wife was at a meeting — thank God she was out of the house.”

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