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Nigeria police, local chief say Lagos pipeline leak report 'just a rumour'
AFP
LAGOS
Petroleumworld.com 12 29 06Nigerian police Thursday evening said that what they had earlier said was an oil pipeline leakage in a northern suburb of Lagos, the country's main city, was in fact "just a rumour".
"It was a rumour; we went round the whole place and there was nothing like that," Lagos police spokesman Bode Ojanuni told AFP.
The reports of the leakage and one report of a subsequent explosion came just 48 hours after a real oil pipeline explosion in another northern suburb that left at least 269 people dead.
The same police spokesman had told AFP earlier in the day that police had knowledge of a pipeline leakage.
"What we know of is a leakage of petrol from a pipeline at Ipaja area of the city. No information yet on any explosion," he had said.
Ojanuni had no explanation to give for changing his version of the facts.
Halidu Baruwa, a local chief in Ipaja, also dismissed reports of an oil leakage or explosion in his area as being "an unfounded rumour".
"This morning I got more than 20 phone calls telling me of an explosion in my community. I mobilised my people and we visited all the pipelines in the area and we found nothing," he told AFP in Ipaja.
"My understanding is that people panicked because of the explosion two days ago in Abule-Egba and because we have had problems of oil pollution in our community," he said.
The Nigerian Red Cross, which said earlier its teams on the ground in the area, alerted to a reported incident involving a pipeline, had so far seen no signs of any leak, any explosion or any fire, by late afternoon was ruling out that anything had happened.
"Asked whether he could rule out any incident Thursday involving a pipeline Red Cross Executive Secretary Abiodun Orebiyi, said: "Nothing happened. We have been round the district and we have not seen anything and not heard about anything".
The industry source who had earlier spoken of an explosion on Thursday evening said that "confusion had been caused by a leakage and a fire that got out of control" but that had nothing to do with any pipeline or any oil installation.
A spokesman for the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC), the state-owned company tasked with maintaining pipelines and distributing oil products, had right from the start denied any pipeline leak, much less any explosion or fire.
"I have contacted the area manager who told me there was no pipeline vandalisation, not to talk of an explosion. It was a false alarm", Ralph Ugwu had told AFP.
AFP 28 1725 GMT 12 06
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