Nigeria pipeline blast kills up to 200 people

INAGBE BEACH, Nigeria - Up to 200 people were burned to death on Friday when an oil pipeline exploded on the outskirts of Lagos after thieves tapped into it to steal fuel.

The huge blast left about 100 blackened, unrecognisable corpses strewn across a beach where young men were siphoning fuel into jerry cans for sale on the black market.

The explosion burned everything within a 20m radius.

Only gray skulls and bones, incinerated to near powder, remained of the five people closest to the pipeline, which had been dug out of the sand and bore marks of drilling.

Burned corpses were strewn on the water's edge a few meters away, where the golden sand was still steaming hot on Friday afternoon.

Other bodies, charred and bloated, floated in the waters of the creek, about a mile from Lagos city centre by boat.

"You can see the corpses. Some are burned to ash. Others are remnants ... We estimate 150 to 200 people died," Lagos State Police Commissioner Emmanuel Adebayo said at the scene.

Theft of petrol and crude oil from pipelines is common in Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer where the vast majority of people live in poverty.

"This is caused by hunger and greed. If you've got no job and you're hungry you take advantage of anything to feed your family. Anyone who takes this kind of risk is desperate," said Olanrewaju Saka-Shenayon, a Lagos State government official.

The pipeline, which belongs to state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, runs just under the surface of Inagbe Beach, a stretch of sand on one of many islands that dot the Atlantic coast around Lagos.

It carries petrol from a large tanker jetty to a distribution depot inland.

Dead of night

Local government workers wearing rubber gloves hauled rigid corpses out of the water and used a makeshift stretcher to carry them up the beach to a shallow mass grave a short distance away.

About a dozen police and a few Red Cross officials were at the scene.

Inagbe Beach is not a populated area but hundreds of mostly young men apparently came there to tap into the pipeline at dead of night.

The beach is a short distance away from the village of Ilado, where about 50 people died in a similar inferno last year.

Most of the victims were probably members of a skilled petrol-theft gang, who know the location of vulnerable pipelines and hire local thugs or police to protect them while they siphon fuel at the dead of night, Saka-Shenayon said.

"The first people to arrive at the scene saw uniformed policemen among the dead. The gangs come with guns and drive away the local community," he said.

A dilapidated port city home to an estimated 13 million people, Lagos has been hit before by devastating explosions. A blast at a munitions dump in 2002 killed more than 1,000 people.

In Jesse, in the southern state of Delta, a pipeline fire also caused by vandals killed about 250 people in 2000. Another blast in the same place killed about 1,000 people in 1998.

- REUTERS