International
580 of fleeing crowd drown
Lagos (NIGERIA), Jan. 28. More than 580 bodies were pulled from a Lagos canal on Monday after a massive crowd stampeded as it fled a huge arms dump explosion in the city.
``I have counted more than 580 (bodies), I am looking for my children. I have been here since the morning,'' said Shola Odun, a printer. ``They have been pulling the bodies out of here since first thing. They are taking them away. I am looking for my children, my relatives, there are more than 580 bodies. One man here lost six of his children. He found them. He is dying,'' Mr. Odun added.
Black Africa's most densely inhabited city _ home to 12 million people _ was shaken repeatedly late on Sunday night by the massive explosions, set off by a fire at a military armoury.
The Lagos State Information Commissioner, Dele Alake, said the State Governor, Bola Tinubu, was due at the scene. ``We have had the reports of the drowning. It seems there was a stampede last night. The Governor is going to visit so until then we cannot confirm on numbers but we fear it was big,'' Mr. Alake said.
Burning shrapnel from the blasts also lit fires that caved in the roof of a church on the top floor of a four-storey building in the nearby neighbourhood of Oshodi. A radio and television repair shop there was destroyed by a shell, which left jagged fragments jutting from the ground nearby. "I was so afraid, I ran away without being able to save even a pocket radio,'' said the shop owner, Sani Mohammed. Next door, the windows and ceiling tiles of the Mandela Hospital were destroyed, though all patients were safely evacuated, hospital staff said. State and military officials went on national television to appeal for calm. They said the explosions were an accident at an old facility and assured the population they were not an indication of military unrest.
A police officer said the blasts had apparently been touched off by an explosion at a nearby gas station.
This could not be independently confirmed.
An army spokesman said a fire spread to the munitions depot, but had no details on where it started. The oil-rich nation of Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, and Lagos is its largest city.
The President, Olusegun Obasanjo, toured the base on Monday morning, addressing hundreds of soldiers and their families who had fled the barracks. He promised the military would investigate.
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