Nigeria is Africa's largest petroleum exporter and the fifth largest source of United States oil imports.
At least 105 people lost their lives as some of them were trying to gather some of the leaking fuel, police and witnesses said.
The police only recovered a few corpses, many of the other dead were burnt to ashes,” Richard Johnson, a witness, said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the blast, but there are speculations so far that the blast was caused by an electrical generator that had been brought to the scene to help pump out the fuel for people’s containers.
President Mahamadou Issoufou has travelled to visit some of the injured in hospital and he confirmed with the Red Cross authorities the amount of people that were killed(105) and said more deaths were likely as rescue crews continued to collect bodies and interview survivors, who included an unknown number of people suffering from burns.
About a year ago, more than 30 people in the same area were burned to death while scooping fuel from a crashed oil tanker.
DailyMail