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Thousands Of Nigerian Children Missing After Weapons Store Blast
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| A Nigerian man pulls a dead body from the canal in which hundreds of Lagosians drowned fleeing an ammunition dump blast |
LAGOS, Jan. 29 (News Agencies) - Parents and relatives searched Tuesday for thousands of children still missing in Nigeria's main city after a stampede flight from a massive weapons store explosion left more than 600 people, mostly children, dead.
In a statement to national television and radio late Monday, President Olusegun Obasanjo declared the explosion and the mass drowning of more than 600 fleeing children and youths in a canal complex a "national disaster", AFP reported. Flags should be flown at half-mast nationwide, he said, reiterating a promise made earlier of a full inquiry.
Anger is growing over the military's use of a badly maintained weapons store in a densely-populated area of a massive city to hold the heavy weapons which devastated Lagos Sunday.
Newspapers voiced calls Tuesday for the inquiry to be thorough and independent.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Red Cross said it believed thousands of children were still missing 36 hours after fleeing the explosion. "Many thousands of people, most of them children, have been displaced. There are thousands still missing," Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa told AFP here.
The Red Cross has set up two camps to register displaced people and is providing food, water, clothing and comfort, he said.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled the densely populated Ikeja area of Lagos, the industrial and residential heart of mainland Lagos, late Sunday when a weapons store exploded after a fire. The blast sent orange and red fireballs into the sky and rained missiles down all over the city.
In the mass panic, tens of thousands of Ikeja residents living close to the army barracks fled to the Isolo area and ran into a major canal complex, hundreds unable to escape.
Many children, too small to stand up in the canal, drowned.
One Nigerian newspaper, National Interest, on Tuesday put the toll of the mass drowning at more than 2,000 dead but this could not be confirmed and was far higher than the figure of more than 600 admitted by Obasanjo.
Bawa said efforts to re-unite the missing with their families had begun Monday but so far it was slow work. "So far we have registered 800 displaced people. Our mission is to link up missing families. Three hundred unaccompanied children have so far been registered," he said. "It is difficult to find one family intact," Bawa said.
"You can see the pain and anguish on the faces of the parents who have lost their children," he added. Obasanjo said that the priority was to find the children who had fled, then sort out accommodation, food and necessary assistance ahead of a speedy military inquiry.
In his statement, Obasanjo called the disaster a monumental tragedy. "What happened in Lagos was a monumental tragedy," he said. "Over 600 people mostly children and youths died in the disaster. It was a national disaster."
Appearing on television late Sunday to declare that the explosions did not signal the country's seventh military coup, an embarrassed Ikeja garrison commanding officer, Brigadier-General George Emdin, apologized to Lagosians. "On behalf of the military I would like to apologize," he said.
The explosion was the result of an accident in "an old ammunition depot with high-calibre bombs". This was unlikely to placate everyone. Members of the Army Wives Association told AFP that the military had been warned before about the weapons dump after a smaller blast last year.
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