OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) – A series of explosions at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 20 people and injured more than 600 others on Sunday, authorities said.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said in a statement on state television that the blast was due to the “negligent handling of dynamite” at the military barracks near Mondong Nkuantoma in Bata. He said the blast occurred at 4 p.m. local time.
“The impact of the blast damaged almost all the houses and buildings in Bata,” the president said in the statement. It was in Spanish.
The Ministry of Defense on Sunday declared that a fire in 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 Ministry of Health tweeted earlier that 17 people had been killed and that the president had declared 15.
Equatorial Guinea, a small West African country with 1.3 million people south of Cameroon, was a colony of Spain until it became independent in 1968.
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.”
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 tweeted that 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.
Images in the local media seen by The Associated Press show people screaming and crying through the streets amid debris and smoke. Roofs of houses were ripped off and wounded were taken to a hospital.
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 grievous 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, said on Twitter 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.”
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By Sam Mednick and Joseph Wilson