Many corpses, but also survivors, were uprooted from the rubble on Monday, the day after four terrifying accidental explosions devastated a military camp and surrounding neighborhoods in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, pushing the provisional toll of this tragedy to 98 dead at least and 615 injured.
Three children aged 3 and 4 were notably taken alive from the ruins of dwellings and transported to hospital, according to TVGE, a state television which reports to the Ministry of Information.
The irremovable president Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled this small Central African country with an iron fist for nearly 42 years, has blamed neighboring farmers for poorly controlled burning and the “negligence” of the military in charge of monitoring the land. arsenal at the Nkoa Ntoma camp, in the country’s economic capital.
The very powerful blasts, spaced long minutes apart in the middle of the afternoon, literally devastated the buildings of the camp housing special forces soldiers and gendarmes, as well as their families, and gutted or flattened countless houses in the surrounding neighborhoods.
On the night of Sunday to Monday, residents of Bata assured AFP that buildings continued to burn and that low-power detonations were still perceptible from time to time.
“For the moment, we deplore 98 dead and 615 wounded”, announced in the evening on his Twitter account the vice-president responsible for Defense and Security, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the head of state and nicknamed Teodorin.
All day long, the authorities remained silent on the results of the many macabre discoveries filmed on TVGE, until the announcement of the vice-president, often presented as the dolphin of President Obiang, holder at 78 years of the world record for longevity. in power for a living president.
The Ministry of Defense had spoken, Sunday evening, of 20 dead and at least 600 wounded and the TVGE had announced in the morning the discovery of 10 new corpses.
“Entirely burnt”
“My uncle, an officer of the camp, has just called us to say that he had found this morning the bodies of five members of his family completely burned”, testifies for AFP by telephone a resident of Bata who requested the anonymity.
“We did not sleep all night, houses continued to burn all night and we could still hear small bangs; residents of neighborhoods located within a radius of 2 to 4 km from the site of the explosions were unable to return, ”said another resident contacted by telephone, Teodoro Nguema, to AFP.
The TVGE broadcast images of rescuers or ordinary civilians repeatedly extracting bodies from still smoking ruins. Here, men carry a corpse in a yellow sheet in the middle of a heap of pieces of concrete and metal sheets, there a civilian places the lifeless body of a child on the bed of a truck.
The day before, the public channel had shown many children, women, men and elders fleeing, sometimes worn or limping, in a desolate landscape still shrouded in thick billows of smoke and dust after the terrifying blasts.
In a hospital in Bata, many wounded, some on the floor and on a drip, received first aid in an atmosphere of chaos.
“Negligence”
“The town of Bata was the victim of an accident caused by the negligence of the unit responsible for guarding the dumps of dynamite, explosives and ammunition which caught fire because of the burns set in their fields by the farmers who finally detonated successively these deposits ”, had detailed in a press release the Head of State.
Then the Ministry of Defense explained that “explosions (…) of large caliber ammunition” had caused “shock waves completely destroying many neighboring houses”.
The city of Bata is home to around 800,000 of the roughly 1.4 million inhabitants of this small state rich in oil and gas, but where the vast majority of the population lives below the poverty line.
President Obiang ordered an investigation and “appealed to the international community to support Equatorial Guinea”.
Vice President Teodorin Obiang appeared at length on Sunday and Monday, surveying the rubble and visiting the wounded in hospital, surrounded by a handful of his usual Israeli bodyguards.
Equatorial Guinea is one of the most closed countries in Africa, if not the world, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s regime is regularly accused of human rights abuses by its opponents and international organizations.