At least 100 people were dead in a huge inferno at an industrial gas plant in southeastern Nigeria on Christmas Eve.
The fireball destroyed nearby buildings and left burned corpses littering the plant in Nnewi, according to witnesses.
The fire erupted at at 11am local time on Thursday, consumed victims who had been waiting in line to collect crude oil from the Inter Corp Oil Limited gas plant – a subsidiary of Nigerian conglomerate Chicason Group.
A witness, Emeka Peters, said the fire broke out when a tanker truck that had finished discharging fresh gas at the plant left without waiting to observe the prescribed cooling time.
‘The fire exploded like a bomb, and the whole gas station went up in thick, black smoke amidst an explosion from cooking gas cylinders,’ he said.
Many people were killed, and most of them were those that had been in the station queuing all day to get their cylinders refilled.’
