Vandalised oil pipeline explosion kills up to 250

Up to 250 people, many of them children, are believed to have been killed when a damaged oil pipeline exploded at a village in southern Nigeria.

Up to 250 people, many of them children, are believed to have been killed when a damaged oil pipeline exploded at a village in southern Nigeria.

The victims had been using buckets and bedpans to collect fuel gushing from a puncture in the pipeline when a fireball engulfed them.

Yesterday, 24 hours after the blast at Adeje, near the refinery city of Warri in the Niger Delta valley, the fire was still raging out of control and no fire crews had arrived. Clouds of acrid black smoke hung over the scene.

The badly charred corpses of up to 100 unidentified people were scattered around the pipeline. Many were children or teenagers in school uniform who had presumably come to help their mothers fill buckets.

The dead may have been immolated as their petrol-soaked clothing caught fire after the explosion. Up to 100 people were seriously injured and the same number reported missing. Dozens who survived the inferno are believed to have fled into hiding and are being treated at home for fear of detection by police hunting the hospitals for fuel thieves. Police have in the past threatened to shoot oil scavengers.

By last night police had yesterday sealed off the immediate scene of the explosion and state petroleum company workers fought to contain the flames.

A man who lives near the scene of the blast, Monday Ochuko, said: "When we heard the explosion and saw the raging fire we considered it normal, because the breaking of pipelines and siphoning of fuel is happening all the time. But when people started screaming we rushed there and saw the bodies."

The leak is believed to have been caused by vandals or thieves who hacked through the pipe with sharp implements. People flocked to scoop up the fuel, just as they did two years ago, when a similar accident killed more than 700 people 12 miles away in the town of Jesse. Most of the dead in that disaster were women and children.

A government statement expressed sympathy for the loss of life but added that "a vital petroleum products pipeline" had been destroyed.

Pipeline accidents and fires are depressingly common in Nigeria where, despite the size of oil reserves, extreme poverty is rampant and affordable fuel scarce. Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer and a member of Opec, but still experiences acute petroleum shortages, particularly in the rural areas. Pipeline fires are so common that fire crews long ago gave up trying to react quickly to them.

With the black market in stolen fuel and petrol booming, gangs of armed youths are increasingly targeting the 3,000-mile network of pipelines which criss-cross the oil-producing areas. The illegal traders have even started driving road tankers to collection points.

"The tanker drivers puncture the pipeline and pump gasoline into their vehicles and then drive off, leaving fuel gushing out. Villagers then come in with their buckets and jerry cans," one official said yesterday.

At least three international oil conglomerates - the Anglo- Dutch company Shell, Elf and the Italian state-owned company Agip - have suffered from saboteurs desperate to get petroleum products to sell on the black market. After the 1998 tragedy in Jesse the government launched a campaign to warn villagers about the dangers of "scooping" fuel from illegally broken pipelines. But many are too desperate for fuel to heed the warnings.

There have been at least six serious accidents involving oil "scoopers" already this year. In June fire engulfed a ruptured pipeline at Okuedjegba near Warri, killing an undetermined number of villagers.

Just three weeks previously local youths set fire at four separate points on a pipeline linking Warri to Kaduna. Police arrested thieves but the number of dead remains undetermined.

In March at least 50 villagers scooping up petrol from a broken pipeline at Umuichieichi-Umungbede village in south-eastern Abia state were burnt alive after an explosion. Scores were wounded.

The government has vowed to stamp out pipeline vandalism and fuel theft but few local people in the Niger Delta valley have job opportunities and there is discontent at the failure of successive regimes to channel any of the vast oil wealth the area generates back to local communities.