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Federal authorities in the United States say they are putting all available resources into an investigation into an early Friday morning explosion in the city of Nashville that local police said they believe was an “intentional act”.

In an early afternoon news briefing, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matt Foster of the FBI said federal and local officials are working to investigate several leads related to the explosion, which occurred about 6:30am local time (12:30 GMT).

“This is our city, too. We live here, we work here, and we’re putting everything we have into finding who was responsible for what’s happened here today,” Foster told reporters, describing the blast as a “very tragic Christmas Day event”.

Foster did not go into specific detail about the continuing investigation but urged anyone with information about the explosion to contact the FBI. The Metro Nashville Police Department earlier on Friday said it was linked to a vehicle.

“We will find out what happened here,” Foster said.

Fire officials reported taking three people to hospital but none of them was critically hurt.

Images on Friday morning showed billowing smoke, debris and emergency crews at the blast site in downtown Nashville, the capital of the state of Tennessee and the legendary home of country music in the US.

The area where the explosion occurred is packed with bars, restaurants and other retail stores, and officials said several buildings suffered structural damage as a result of the blast.

The authorities did not immediately say what the motive of the explosion could be.

Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from Washington, DC, said police were called about a suspicious recreational vehicle that did not have any number plates. Police went to the scene and alerted the bomb squad to investigate.

“While further reinforcements were on their way, there was this explosion,” Rattansi said.

He added that people miles away from the site said they felt the explosion and that at least 20 buildings have been damaged.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Metro Nashville Police Department, said police “do not know whether anyone was inside the RV when it exploded”.

 

He also said announcements were coming from the RV. “That’s the extent of what we can say at this point,” Aaron said.

Police canine units have been conducting “protective sweeps” of the downtown area, the Nashville police department said, and traffic was restricted downtown.

The city’s fire department said teams were going into buildings in the explosion area to make sure that the structures are secure and to check whether there are any victims.

Buildings shook in the area as a loud boom was heard.

Buck McCoy, who lives near the area, said the windows of his home were blown out.

“All my windows, every single one of them got blown into the next room. If I had been standing there it would have been horrible,” he told The Associated Press news agency.

“It felt like a bomb. It was that big,” he said.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee tweeted, “Federal, state and local law enforcement partners are on the scene to investigate what we believe was an intentional act.”

A spokesman for Donald Trump said the US president has been briefed on the explosion and would continue to receive regular updates.

“The president is grateful for the incredible first responders and praying for those who were injured,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Judd Deere said, as reported by the White House press pool.

Meanwhile, Nashville Mayor John Cooper said earlier on Friday that officials are waiting for the investigation to unfold.

“It will take a little bit of time to get to the bottom of it,” he told local reporters on Friday morning.

 

“I do think it was clearly done when nobody was going to be around,” Cooper said, adding that he would wait for investigators’ probe before speculating on why that may be.

 

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