This incident happened since Monday and we are just hearing about it now?
LAGOS (AFP) - More than 70 people burned to death in northern Nigeria when a tanker lorry caught fire as they were stealing fuel from it, police said Wednesday.
At least 100 other victims are being treated for burns, another official said.
The accident happened on Monday evening in Kaduna state, Kaduna's police spokesman Saad Yahaya said before adding that "more than 70 people have been confirmed dead."
"One hundred and one survivors, mostly youths, are being treated , for varying degrees of burns," Aliyu Saleh Raminkura, the executive secretary of the state's emergency management agency told AFP.
"The tanker turned over, the villagers came to scoop fuel and then the tanker caught fire", he explained.
Yahaya said the tanker overturned while trying to park in the village of Katugal, some 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of the state capital Kaduna.
It was not immediately clear if the impact of the accident caused fuel to leak from the tanker or whether the vehicle was vandalized.
Events perceived as giving a negative image of the country are not reported on by state media in Nigeria. This explains why news of the accident took so long to become public.
Road accidents with large casualty figures are common in Nigeria where vehicles are often poorly maintained, overloaded and driven in a reckless fashion.
In November of last year a driver lost control of his lorry outside Kaduna during gubernatorial primaries and crashed into a crowd, crushing scores of people to death.
Almost equally common are fires where people perish whilst helping themselves to fuel, be it from oil company installations or trucks.
Nigeria's tens of millions who live in poverty rarely pass up on opportunities to gather free fuel, which can always be sold in jerrycans to motorists who run out, from pipelines or vehicles that have either been damaged or vandalized.
Vandalism of pipelines and related installations is extremely common, with an official report published last July registering 2,258 such acts in the previous five years.
For 2005 alone, an estimated 650,000 tonnes of crude was lost through such incidents, according to the same report.
Last December a fire at a vandalised pipeline in Lagos killed some 260 people who were scooping fuel from it in the hope of making a few dollars.
Across the country in the past 10 years, thousands of people have died while stealing oil.
In the worst such incident, in Jeese village in the southern Delta State in 1998, more than 1,000 suspected fuel thieves were roasted alive after an explosion.
The Nigerian authorities habitually show little sympathy for those who die in such explosions, condemning them as greedy.
Nigeria is Africa's biggest crude oil producer but nevertheless relies on imports for its refined product requirements as its own refineries are not in working order.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070328/wl_africa_afp/nigeriaoilaccidenthttp://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=303252&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=362659&sid=WOR
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