CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (AFP) – Ukrainians held candlelit vigils yesterday to mark 30 years since the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl spewed radiation across Europe and left several thousand people dead or dying.

Church bells rang and mourners laid flowers at Chernobyl’s memorial square as the clock turned 1:23 am – the moment the plant’s reactor number four exploded and changed the fate of a generation living across the former Soviet Union.

“There was crying and screaming,” local pensioner Maria Urupa told AFP as she recalled the terror that struck locals as they watched poisonous clouds of radiation waft in from the plant.

At least 30 people were killed on site and several thousand more are feared to have died from radiation in what Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said “appears to have been the world’s largest man-made catastrophe”.

The exact number of dead remains a subject of intense debate because the Soviet authorities kept most of the information about the disaster hidden.

More than 200 tonnes of uranium remain inside the crippled reactor that spattered radiation across three quarters of Europe after a botched safety test.

Lingering fears of new leaks occurring, should the ageing structure covering the toxins crack, have prompted a global push to fund the construction of a giant new arch that should keep the site safe for generations.

Chernobyl’s reactor exploded on April 26 and burned for 10 days in a disaster that horrified the world, but which locals only heard about through rumours and tidbits from jammed Western radio broadcasts.

The Communist Party kept to its steadfast tradition of saying nothing or lying in order to keep the public from learning of a tragedy that could tarnish the image of the Cold War-era superpower.

International suspicions were only raised on April 28 after Sweden detected an unexplained rise in its own radiation levels.

“Nobody told us anything. There was only silence,” local resident Yevgeny Markevich recalled in an interview with

AFP.

It took the authorities a day-and-a-half to evacuate the 48,000 inhabitants from the nearby town of Pripyat.

They eventually relocated 116,000 people that year from the 30-kilometre (19-mile) exclusion zone that still surrounds the now-dormant plant.

Some 600,000 people who became known as “liquidators” – mostly emergency workers and state employees – were dispatched with little or no protective gear to help put out the toxic flames and clean up surrounding lands.

A UN report in 2005 estimated that “up to 4,000” people could eventually perish from the invisible poison in Ukraine and neighbouring Russia and Belarus.