In yet another incident of fuel tanker explosion, at least 94 people were killed and several injured following a blast that was triggered after a fatal accident in Nigeria, CNN reported on Wednesday.
The explosion occurred past midnight in Jigawa state after the tanker driver lost control of the vehicle while travelling on a highway close to a university, police spokesperson Lawan Adam said. “The residents were scooping up fuel from the overturned tanker when the explosion occurred, sparking a massive inferno that killed 94 people on the spot,” Adam said.
Last month, a fuel tanker collided head-on with another truck in Nigeria on Sunday causing an explosion that killed at least 48 people, the country's emergency response agency said. The fuel tanker was also carrying cattle in the Agaie area in north-central Niger state and at least 50 of them were burned alive, Abdullahi Baba-Arab, director-general of the Niger State Emergency Management Agency, said.
With the absence of an efficient railway system to transport cargo, fatal truck accidents are common along most of the major roads in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. In 2020 alone, there were 1,531 gasoline tanker crashes resulting in 535 fatalities and 1,142 injuries, according to Nigeria's Federal Road Safety Corps.
Prior to this incident, at least 100 villagers were killed in northeastern Nigeria when suspected Boko Haram Islamic extremists opened fire on a market, on worshippers and in people's homes, the latest killings in Africa's longest struggle with militancy. More than 50 extremists on motorcycles rode into the Tarmuwa council area of Yobe state on Sunday evening and began firing before setting buildings ablaze, according to Yobe police spokesperson Dungus Abdulkarim.
The police blamed the attack on Boko Haram, which since 2009 has launched an insurgency to establish its radical interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, in the region. Boko Haram has since splintered into different factions, together accounting for the direct deaths of at least 35,000 people and the displacement of more than 2 million, as well as a humanitarian crisis with millions of people in dire need of foreign aid.
(with inputs from agency)
