More than 30 people were killed in an explosion which demolished three apartment blocks and tore open a bank in central Lagos today.
"As I'm speaking to you now there are over 30 bodies in themortuary and there could still be many more dead in the debris," Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu told journalists at the scene.
He said police ballistics experts would launch an investigation to discover the cause of the blast. Local media described it as a bomb blast. Government officials said they were still trying to determine how it happened.
The blast ripped the front off the Prudent Bank building and witnesses saw people scavenging through the wreckage for cash and youths stashing bags of money into the boot of a car.
Mr Emmanuel Ijewere, the head of the Nigerian Red Cross, said the blast came from a three-storey building next to the bank.
The collapsed buildings housed a mix of office and residential property in Lagos Island, the heavily populated commercial centre of Lagos, a crowded city of 12 million people.
The explosion resounded across Lagos at around 10 a.m. (Irish time). Waves of panic seized the crowds in the narrow streets around the scene of the blast, near the central mosque.
Local civilians and rescue services combed through the wreckage in search of the dead and injured. A crowd of residents thronged the scene, but scattered when heavily armed police arrived, shooting in the air and shouting through a loudspeaker: "Let us through to help our brothers!"
Terrorism has not been ruled out in a country riven with inter-ethnic rivalries.