OGAGADUGO, Burkina Faso – An explosion at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea has killed at least 20 people and injured more than 600, officials say.
President Theodore Obiang Nugma said the 4pm blast was caused by “ignoring dynamite” at a military barracks in the neighborhood of Bata’s Mondong Nkuantoma.
The president said in a statement that the blast damaged almost all of Bata’s houses and flats.
The defense ministry issued a statement late Sunday night saying a fire at an arms depot in the barracks had caused high-caliber ammunition to explode. It said a temporary number of people, including 20 dead and 600 injured, would be given a full investigation into the cause of the blasts.
The country’s president said the fire may have been caused by residents burning fields around the barracks.
State television showed a large plume of smoke over the blast site, with many shouting, “We don’t know what happened, but it’s all destroyed.”
Amid images in the local media seen by the Associated Press, people are screaming and crying in the streets amid debris and smoke. The roofs of the houses were torn down and the injured were taken to hospital.
Equatorial Guinea, an African country of 1.3 million people south of Cameroon, was a Spanish colony until its independence in 1968. Bata has a population of about 175,000.
The health ministry called on blood donors and volunteer health workers to go to the regional hospital de Bata, one of the three hospitals treating the injured.
The ministry said its health personnel were treating the injured at the crash site and at medical facilities but people are still feared missing under the rubble out of fear.
The blasts were a shock to the oil-rich Central African nation. Foreign Minister Simon Oyono Isono Angu met with foreign ambassadors and sought help.
“It is important for us to ask our brother countries for their help in this tragic situation because we have a health crisis (due to Kovid-1to) and a tragedy in Bata,” he said.
Calling TVGE, the doctor, whose first name is Florentino, said the situation was a “moment of emergency” and hospitals were overcrowded. He said the sports center set up for Kovid-19 patients would be used in minor cases.
The radio station, Radio Makuto, tweeted that people were being evacuated within four kilometers of the city as the fog could be harmful.
After the blast, the Spanish embassy in Equatorial Guinea recommended on Twitter that “Spanish citizens stay in their homes.”
