OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso – A series of explosions in a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 600 on Sunday, officials said.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said the 4 pm explosion was due to “negligent handling of dynamite” at the military barracks located in the Mondong Nkuantoma neighborhood in Bata.
“The impact of the explosion caused damage to almost all of Bata’s houses and buildings,” the president said in a statement, in Spanish.
The defense ministry released a statement late Sunday saying that a fire at an arms depot in the barracks caused the explosion of high-caliber ammunition. The agency said the provisional death toll was 20 and 600 injured, adding that the cause of the explosions would be fully investigated.
The country’s president said the fire may have been caused by residents who burned the fields around the barracks.
State television showed a huge cloud of smoke rising above the blast site as the crowds fled, with many people shouting “we don’t know what happened, but everything is destroyed”.
Images in the local media seen by The Associated Press showed people screaming and crying running through the streets amid rubble and smoke. The roofs of the houses were uprooted and the wounded were transported to a hospital.
Equatorial Guinea, an African country of 1.3 million inhabitants located in the 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 called for blood donors and voluntary health workers to go to the Regional Hospital de Bata, one of three hospitals that treat the wounded.
The ministry said its health professionals are treating the wounded at the scene of the disaster and in medical facilities, but feared that there are still people missing under the rubble.
The explosions came as a shock to the oil-rich Central African nation. Chancellor Simeón Oyono Esono Angue met with foreign ambassadors and asked for help.
“It is important for us to ask for help from our sister countries in this unfortunate situation, since we have a health emergency (due to Covid-19) and the tragedy in Bata,” he said.
A doctor who called TVGE, who answered by his first name, Florentino, said that 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 minor cases.
The radio station, Rádio Macuto, tweeted that people were being evacuated less than four kilometers from the city because the smoke could be harmful.
After the explosion, the Spanish Embassy in Equatorial Guinea recommended on Twitter that “the Spaniards stay in their homes”.