About 40 people have died in a fire at an oil pipeline after it was vandalised by looters in the southern Nigerian state of Lagos, a police spokesman said on Wednesday. Thirty-four bodies had been recovered from the site of Tuesday’s explosion, said Lagos state police spokesman Frank Mba, but others had already been buried at the scene.
The explosion, on a pipeline belonging to the state oil firm NNPC that carries imported gasoline from the Lagos port to inland depots, occurred on Tuesday at Igbagbon, a village near the coastal city of Lagos. It was a stretch of pipeline in remote swamp waters, and news of the fire only filtered out on Wednesday morning.
The tragedy occurred when a group of people vandalised a pipeline and tried to scoop fuel from the gushing leak, police said on Wednesday.
Signs at the scene of the explosion, where sand had been dug away to lay bare a punctured pipeline, indicated the vandalisation attempt was a fairly well-organised, large-scale affair.
The bodies of the victims had been hastily buried at the scene of the explosion. A few charred body parts protruded from one of the three mass graves. Lagos police spokesman Frank Mbah told reporters that officers counted 34 bodies at the scene.
Twenty-eight bodies, burnt beyond recognition, were buried in a mass grave near the site by Red Cross volunteers, said Abiodun Orebiyi, secretary of the Nigerian Red Cross.
Orebiyi said the final toll may never be known, since local people who arrived at the scene earlier had also buried some of the dead.
“There were more than 40 bodies when we first got here,” said Ganiyu Odukale, a resident of the Igbagbon fishing community closest to disaster location, who said he was among the first to arrive at the scene on Tuesday.