Pipeline Explosion Kills 200

A pipeline explosion killed up to 200 people on the outskirts of Lagos on Friday, leaving charred corpses on a sandy beach where locals tapping the pipe to steal fuel ignited the blast.

The Red Cross said the pipeline blew up in the early hours of the morning while thieves were siphoning fuel into jerry cans for sale on the black market. The massive explosion cooked everything within a 20 meter radius.

Only gray calcinated skulls and bones were left of five people who were closest to the pipeline, which had been dug out of the sand and bore marks of drilling in several places.

About 100 blackened, unrecognizable corpses were strewn on the water's edge a few meters away, where the golden sand was still steaming hot on Friday afternoon.

Some bodies, charred and bloated, floated in the waters of the creek, which is only about a mile from Lagos city center by boat.

"You can see the corpses. Some are burned to ash. Others are remnants. ... We estimate 150 to 200 people died," Lagos State Police Commissioner Emmanuel Adebayo said at the scene.

Theft of petrol and crude oil from pipelines is common in Nigeria, an oil producing country where the vast majority of people live in poverty.

"This is caused by hunger and greed. If you've got no job and you're hungry you take advantage of anything to feed your family. Anyone who takes this kind of risk is desperate," said Olanrewaju Saka-Shenayon, a Lagos State government official.

The pipeline, which belongs to state company Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), runs just under the surface of Inagbe Beach, a stretch of golden sand on one of many islands that dot the Atlantic coast around Lagos.

It carries petrol from a large tanker jetty to a distribution depot inland.

Local government workers wearing rubber gloves hauled bodies out of the water and used a makeshift stretcher to carry them up the beach to a shallow grave a short distance away.

About a dozen police and a few Red Cross officials were at the scene.

Inagbe Beach is not a populated area but hundreds of mostly young men apparently came there to tap into the pipeline at the dead of night. The beach is a short distance away from the village of Ilado, where about 50 people died in a similar inferno last year.

A dilapidated port city home to an estimated 13 million people, Lagos has been hit before by devastating explosions. A blast at a munitions dump in 2002 killed more than 1,000 people.

In Jesse, in the southern state of Delta, a pipeline fire also caused by vandals killed about 250 people in 2000.