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Red Cross ends work after Nigeria pipeline, with no survivors
AFP
LAGOS
Petroleumworld.com 05 14 06
The Nigerian Red Cross said Sunday it had halted its rescue work at the scene of a pipeline explosion near Lagos, saying there had been no survivors from the blast that killed up to 200 people.
"We did not recover a single injured person or survivor at the site. They all died," the organisation's secretary general, Abiodun Orebiyi, told AFP by telephone.
"We have wound up our operations at the blast scene. We are not likely to return there again except if there is a fresh need for us."
"It is now left for the government to take up its responsibilities in the area. Our own job there now is finished," he said.
On Friday, after the explosion, the Red Cross chief had put the death toll in the beach village of Ilado at more than 100. Police later raised that figure to between 150 and 200, while other security agents estimated that it could be above 200.
The blast from the pipeline, one of a series of deadly explosions over the past decade in the west African state, was so intense that it pulverised or disfigured the bodies of people, who are suspected of having been siphoning fuel from the pipeline.
Some bodies nearest the explosion were either turned to ashes, which dissolved in the lagoon, or reduced to skeletal remains.
President Olusegun Obasanjo was to visit the scene of the explosion Sunday, according to an official news radio report.
A police contingent was on hand at the airport at Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital, to receive Obasanjo after he arrives from a summit in Indonesia of leaders from large Muslim countries, said national police spokesman Haz Iwendi.
On Saturday the president ordered a police investigation of circumstances that led to the disaster.
Police inspector general Sunday Ehindero announced Saturday he was leading the probe and would find out whether officers had known the "vandals" behind the apparent pipeline siphoning.
He also said about 130 victims from the explosion had been buried in a mass grave on Friday, and that the Red Cross had found 17 other corpses on site at Saturday.
Ehindero said the nature of the disaster had made an exact death toll "difficult to have".
Close to 2,000 people have died in more than a dozen pipeline explosions across the country, Africa's largest oil producer, between 1998 and 2003.
In the worst recorded incident, in October 1998, 1,082 people thought to have been siphoning off fuel died in Jesse, in the oil-rich southern Delta State, after a pipeline there erupted.
Ehindero also announced that a functional police post and a marine police patrol boat would be operational in Ilado within the next 24 hours, and promised to reinforce the marine police monitoring unit.
AFP 14 1114 GMT 05 06
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