AT least 500 people have died in an inferno which engulfed hundreds of people scavenging for petrol from a burst pipeline at Apawor in southern Nigeria on Sunday.
"The casualty [total] is bigger than initially thought, and more are still dying. At least 500 people are so far dead," said Ms Joy Aigbe, a nurse in the oil town of Warri where many of the victims of Sunday's disaster were taken.
She said many of the dead were women and children who had thronged the area with cans and buckets to collect spilled petrol from a burst pipeline belonging to the state-owned Pipeline and Products Marketing Company (PPMC).
The people who crowded at the pipeline had bathed themselves in petrol, and it took just a spark from the exhaust of a motorcycle to set them ablaze, said Mr Dafe Emutoru, a local government official who was one of the first on the scene.
A journalist who visited hospitals around Warri said: "The death toll is rising by the minute. At least five people are dying every hour."
No official death toll has so far been announced for the disaster.
Officials of PPMC, which fed petrol from the refinery in Warri through the pipeline to the northern city of Kaduna, have blamed the disaster on sabotage.
Many of the dead were said to have been trapped in a ditch where a pool of petrol had collected. A wide patch of land the size of a soccer pitch was charred as the fire followed the flow of the volatile liquid.
Latest reports said the disaster scene was still littered with unidentified bodies burnt beyond recognition, while plumes of thick black smoke rose from the persisting fire being fought by firefighters.
PPMC officials said the blaze was coming under control.
"We have shut off the pipeline, and it's just for the spilled fuel to burn out," one official said.
"It was an act of sabotage," Mr Emmanuel Akhihiero, the maintenance superintendent of PPMC, told the military governor of Delta State, Mr Walter Feghabor, who visited the scene.
Reports of sabotage have been growing since oil-producing Nigeria fell into the grip of frequent fuel shortages with the failure of its poorly maintained refineries to meet demand.
But the latest incident is part of a pattern of unrest in Nigeria's oil region where impoverished communities have grown restive over their perceived neglect by government and oil multinationals.
Apart from threatening the source of over 90 per cent of the income of Africa's most populous country of 104 million, the crisis in the oil region also raises worries about military ruler Gen Abdul salami Abubakar's promise to restore civilian rule next May.