By Andrew Irumba
At least 60 people have been confirmed dead after a fuel tanker they were trying to siphon fuel from exploded and burnt them to ashes near Morogoro, Tanzania, on Saturday.
Eyewitnesses reveal that the tragedy occurred when the fuel tanker lost control and overturned on a road west of the country’s economic capital Dar es Salaam.
Shortly after the truck overturning, several locals in the area rushed to the scene and started siphoning fuel. Shortly thereafter there was an explosion, which resulted into billows of fire trapping all those who were at the scene.
The police however said the blast may have been sparked off by a cigarette as people rushed to collect leaking fuel from the truck.
“There was a huge blast which has so far killed at least 57 people,” regional police chief Willbrod Mtafungwa told reporters, although more bodies were still being recovered at the time.
Witnesses told police that they saw the charred remains of several motorcycle taxis, bodies and trees scorched by the power of the explosion.
Mtafungwa said the dead were mainly drivers of the taxis commonly known as “boda-boda” and local residents who flocked the scene for the fuel after the tanker crashed. Police later announced the blaze had been brought under control and preparations to remove the corpses from the scene are already underway.
“The Morogoro region had never experienced a disaster of such magnitude,” Morogoro governor Stephen Kebwe told reporters at the scene in the locality of Msamvu, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) west of Dar es Salaam.
He said the tanker truck overturned on the roadside and the “fuel began to flow freely”.
“We have mobilised all the doctors at the Morogoro regional hospital so the wounded can be treated,” he added, without giving the number of injured.
Such a similar disaster has ever happened in Uganda in 2013 when over 33 people were burnt to death as they tried to siphon fuel from a tanker that had overturned in Lubigi Swamp, along the Masaka-Kampala highway.
