Gas tanker in Nigeria explodes; dozens killed

Peoplewere lined up to get gas to cook Christmas meals.

— A tanker LAGOS, NIGERIA truck exploded outside an industrial plant in rural southeastern Nigeria, killing dozens of people who had lined up for gas to cook their Christmas meals, the authorities announced Friday.

The explosion occurred Thursday afternoon in the city of Nnewi, in Anambra State, according to Chuma Ibeabuchi, the local secretary of the Nigerian Red Cross Society. The inferno sent plumes of acrid black smoke skyward, and it took more than three hours to extinguish.

A number of bodies were charred beyond recognition, and dozens of survivors were hospitalized with severe burns. The government said that “tens of people” had been killed, although local observers, said as many as 100 may have died.

Asked about those reports, police spokesman Ali Alphonsus Okechukwu insisted that the figure was “very wrong,” but said he could not offer a more precise figure.

A witness, Christopher Nwachukwu, told reporters that the blast may have been caused when employees started dispensing cooking gas from the truck without waiting for it to cool first.

“This is a bleak Christmas,” he said.

President Muhammadu Buhari, through a spokesman, said he was “greatly shaken and shocked by such large-scale loss of human lives in a single-industrial accident,” which he said had devastated families “who were looking forward to a joyous Christmas celebration. My heart and prayers go out to these grieving families at this difficult and painful moment.”