OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso – A series of explosions at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 600 others on Sunday, authorities said.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said the blast at 4pm was due to the “negligent handling of dynamite” at the military barracks near Mondong Nkuantoma in Bata.
“The impact of the blast caused damage to almost all the houses and buildings in Bata,” the president said in a statement.
The Ministry of Defense issued a statement late Sunday stating that a fire at an arms depot in the barracks caused the explosion of high-caliber ammunition. It is said that the preliminary toll was 20 dead and 600 injured, adding that the cause of the explosions will be fully investigated.
The country’s president said the fire was possibly the result of residents burning the fields around the barracks.
State television shows a large plume of smoke rising above the blast site as crowds flee, with many people shouting, “we do not know what happened, but it was all destroyed.”
Images on local media seen by The Associated Press showed people screaming and crying through the streets amid debris and smoke. Roofs of houses were ripped off and wounded people were taken to a hospital.
Equatorial Guinea, an African country with 1.3 million inhabitants south of Cameroon, was a colony of Spain until it became independent in 1968. Bata has about 175,000 inhabitants.
The Ministry of Health has appealed to blood donors and volunteer health workers to go to the Regional Hospital de Bata, one of the three hospitals treating the wounded.
The ministry said its health workers were treating the injured at the scene of the tragedy and in medical facilities, but feared people were still missing under the rubble.
The explosions came as a shock to the oil-rich Central African nation. Foreign Minister Simeón Oyono Esono Angue met with foreign ambassadors and asked for help.
“It is important for us to ask our brother countries for their help in this sad situation, as we have an emergency in health (due to Covid-19) and the tragedy in Bata,” he said.
A doctor who called on TVGE, who called Florentino by his first name, said the situation was a ‘moment of crisis’ and that the hospitals were overcrowded. He said a sports center set up for Covid-19 patients would be used to receive small cases.
The radio station, Radio Macuto, tweeted that people are being evacuated within four kilometers of the city because the fumes could be harmful.
Following the blast, the Spanish embassy in Equatorial Guinea recommended on Twitter that “Spanish citizens should stay in their homes.”