Nigeria began yesterday the mass burial of some of the 250 victims of the country's latest fuel pipeline fire, as questions mount about how to prevent such tragedies in future.
Charred bodies littered the ground around the scene of the blaze in the village of Adeje, just outside Warri in southern Nigeria's Delta State, where the fuel pipeline erupted into a ball of fire on Monday.
Nigerian Red Cross and local council workers began burying bodies in a mass grave to prevent the spread of disease, one journalist said.
Firefighters extinguished the blaze on Tuesday, but by then more than 250 people had died and dozens more had been injured, many gruesomely.
"An exact toll is unlikely to be clear for some time, but we know more than 250 people died," a senior police officer said.
"We have recovered a large number of bodies and more were burned to nothing." Red Cross workers also began the work of caring for the wounded, but many of those suffering the worst wounds had left the scene early on Monday for fear of arrest, a Red Cross official said.
The early-morning blast happened while hundreds of people were gathered to scoop fuel illegally in buckets from a pipeline deliberately cracked open by black marketeers.
The blast occurred close to the scene of a similar incident in October 1998 when more than 1,000 people died.
Since then, such incidents have recurred repeatedly, with people still willing to risk their lives to siphon fuel from vandalised pipelines for resale at the roadside.
Officials of the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation said over 500 such incidents occurred in 1999 and said the figure for 2000 is expected to be higher.
Warri, a city of more than half a million people, is one of Nigeria's two main oil-producing towns and site of one of the country's four fuel refineries.
An extensive network of 5,000 km of fuel pipelines, operated by the state-run Petroleum Products Marketing Company, carry fuel from the oil-producing areas to markets in the north.
Monday's blast is expected to lead to a worsening of fuel shortages in the north.
Ordinary Nigerians criticised the government yesterday for not doing enough to improve security at the pipelines and to alleviate the poverty that drives people to tamper with them.