LAGOS: The death toll from the explosion of a petrol tanker truck in Nigeria that killed people rushing to gather fuel has risen to 86, emergency services said on Sunday.

The truck carrying 60,000 litres (nearly 16,000 gallons) of gasoline exploded after flipping over on a road in the centre of the country on Saturday, authorities said.

“The final death toll from the tanker explosion is 86,” said Ibrahim Audu Husseini, spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency in Niger state.

“We buried 86 burnt corpses between 12pm yesterday to 2am of today,” he said, updating an earlier toll of 70.

“It took us 14 hours to bury the bodies because we couldn’t get excavators and had to get locals to dig the mass grave manually.”

The blast struck at the Dikko junction on the road linking the federal capital Abuja to the northern city of Kaduna.

In October, more than 170 people died in a similar accident in Jigawa State, in northern Nigeria.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2025