An overturned oil tanker exploded in
Nigeria while dozens of people were scooping up the leaking fuel and
many were killed, police and witnesses said Saturday.
Hundreds of people have died in similar accidents in recent years in
Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, as impoverished people risk
their lives to collect fuel leaking from pipelines or trucks.
“We have recovered 12 corpses and taken 22 persons with serious burns to
hospital,” police spokeswoman Irene Ugbo told The Associated Press. She
said the blast occurred Friday evening in Odukpani in Cross River state
in the southeast.
But some residents put the death toll closer to 60.
“The police only recovered a few corpses, many of the other dead were burnt to ashes,” witness Richard Johnson told the AP.
He said about 60 people were inside a pit scooping fuel when the
explosion occurred. “It is not likely that anyone inside the pit
survived as there was a lot of fuel in the pit,” Johnson said.
He suggested the blast was caused by an electrical generator that had
been brought to the scene to help pump out the fuel for people’s
containers.
It was not immediately clear what caused the truck to overturn.
About a year ago, more than 30 residents in the same locality were burnt
to death while scooping fuel from an oil tanker involved in an
accident.
Nigeria’s worst such accident occurred in 1998, when more than 1,000
people died as the leaking oil pipeline from which they were collecting
fuel exploded in the town of Jesse.
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