Hundreds of people were burned alive yesterday when fuel spilling from a vandalised pipeline exploded in Nigeria's largest city Lagos, emergency workers said.
Crowds of local residents had gone to scoop up the petrol in plastic containers after an armed gang punctured the underground pipeline overnight to siphon fuel into road tankers.
"The number of dead is confirmed at 269. We have retrieved all the bodies," said Abiodun Orebiyi, secretary general of the Nigerian Red Cross. Another 160 people were taken to two hospitals in Lagos suffering from burns, another Red Cross official said.
Shortly after the blast, hundreds of bodies, most burned beyond recognition, were scattered on the ground next to a ramshackle car workshop and a saw mill in the densely populated Abule Egba district.
Some corpses lay rigid on the earth, their clothes and skin burned off by the blast. Others were reduced to ash.
It took firefighters equipped with leaking water hoses about six hours to extinguish the flames as hundreds of people came to watch.
In the absence of an ambulance service, one group of volunteers loaded charred corpses into a car operated by the Lagos road safety authority.
"One friend knocked on our door and told my husband they were taking fuel. My husband ran out with two buckets and now he has gone. This is a curse from God," said a woman who gave her name as Ole.
Youths with jerry cans were meanwhile offering stolen fuel on a nearby roadside at double the official price. - (Reuters)