Clouds of black smoke billow from the Shoko Maru, a Japanese oil tanker, after it exploded today off the coast of southwest Japan. The captain was missing and four others were severely burned, reports said. The cause of the blast was not known.

TOKYO — A Japanese oil tanker exploded today off the country's southwest coast near Himeji port, leaving one of the eight people aboard missing, the coast guard said. Four others were severely injured.

Photos and video from the scene showed billowing clouds of black smoke as coast guard vessels sought to douse the fire, which gutted the middle of the Shoko Maru, a 998-ton tanker based in the western city of Hiroshima.

Seven people were rescued, though four suffered severe burns, public broadcaster NHK reported. A search was under way for the missing man, the tanker's captain, it said.

The cause of the explosion was unclear, said coast guard spokesman Koji Takarada. NHK said crew members were working on the deck of the tanker at the time of the blast.

CANBERRA, Australia — Investigators searching for the missing Malaysian jet have concluded an area where acoustic signals were detected is not the final resting place of the plane after an unmanned submersible found no trace of it, the search coordinator said today.The U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 finished its final underwater mission in the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday after scouring 330 square miles, the Joint Agency Coordination Center said.“The area can now be discounted as the final resting place” of the missing plane, the Australia-based center said in a statement.The underwater search for the airliner, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, will be suspended for a couple months while more powerful sonar equipment is brought in to search a much wider area of 21,600 square miles, based on analysis of satellite data of the plane's most likely course, the center said.

CAIRO — With nearly all votes counted, Egypt's former military chief has won a crushing victory over his sole opponent with more than 92 percent of the votes, according to results announced by his campaign.The campaign of retired field marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said he won 23.38 million votes, with left-wing politician Hamdeen Sabahi taking 735,285. Invalid votes were 1.07 million, or nearly 350,000 more than the number of votes for the 59-year-old Sabahi.El-Sissi's win was never in doubt, but the career infantry officer, also 59, had hoped for a strong turnout to bestow legitimacy on his ouster last July of Egypt's first freely elected president, the Islamist Mohammed Morsi.According to el-Sissi's campaign, the turnout nationwide was around 44 percent, even after voting was extended for a third day Wednesday — well below the nearly 52 percent turnout in the June 2012 election won by Morsi.

MOSCOW — A Russian spacecraft carrying a three-man crew docked successfully at the International Space Station today following a flawless launch.The Soyuz craft, carrying NASA's Reid Wiseman, Russian cosmonaut Max Surayev and German Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency arrived at the station at 5:44 a.m.They lifted off just less than six hours earlier from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.Mission Control in Moscow congratulated the trio on a successful docking.They are joining two Russians and an American who have been at the station since March.