Ilado, Nigeria – Workers have buried at least 165 people killed in a pipeline explosion, and four bodies were still floating Sunday in tidal mangrove swamps a few miles from the blast site in southern Nigeria, officials said.
Up to 200 people were killed Friday when gasoline seeping out of a ruptured pipeline burst into flames in the fishing village of Ilado about 30 miles east of Nigeria’s main city, Lagos. Police suspect that impoverished villagers punctured the pipeline to steal fuel.
According to police estimates, 100 of the dead were buried Friday and about 65 Saturday in unmarked mass graves. But there was no exact count, and it is possible more may have been buried, local officials said.
Authorities have said they had rushed to bury the dead without identifying them because they were concerned about health risks.
On Sunday, an Associated Press reporter saw four bodies floating in swamps about 3 miles from the site of the explosion. That raised the possibility that more corpses may be drifting or lost in a labyrinth of waterways and creeks leading to a network of lagoons surrounding Lagos.
Lagos, on the western edge of Nigeria’s southern coast, is about 125 miles from the Niger Delta, the country’s main oil-producing region.
Nigeria, which normally pumps 2.5 million barrels of crude oil a day, is Africa’s largest producer and the fifth-largest source of imports to the U.S.
Despite Nigeria’s wealth of natural resources, most of the country’s 130 million people remain deeply poor. This inequity, blamed on official corruption or mismanagement, motivates militant attacks as well as villagers’ stealing of fuel they consider their birthright.
Villagers often tap pipelines to steal fuel for cooking or resale on the black market. More than 1,000 people in Nigeria have died in recent years when fuel they were pilfering from pipelines caught fire.
