Blast victims buried, but some still missing

The unclaimed bodies of 120 victims of a disaster caused by explosions on 27 January at a munitions depot in Lagos were buried on Saturday. They were given a mass burial on the bank of a canal in which most of the over 1,000 victims died while fleeing exploding bombs and shrapnel. The 120 caskets, draped in the Nigerian flag, were placed in a single tomb.

"The unfortunate death of those we have come to bury today will remain a festering wound on our collective conscience as a nation," Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu said at the interment, which had been delayed for two weeks to enable relatives to identify the bodies and give them private burials.

Not all victims of the disaster have been accounted for and the UN Children's Fund, Nigerian Red Cross and Lagos State government are running tracing programmes to reunite missing persons with their families. Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa told IRIN recently that, according to his organisation's records, about 100 people were still missing. "We do believe that quite a number of them may have been found by their families without reporting back to us," he said.

President Olusegun Obasanjo has ordered an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the disaster, which occurred at the Ikeja Military Cantonment. He has promised to make public the results of the probe. According to Obasanjo, funds had been made available to upgrade the munitions dump but this had not been done before disaster struck.

The Vanguard, a Nigerian daily, reported on Saturday that a preliminary report from the official inquiry into the disaster indicated it was caused by sabotage. The report also said large quantities of arms and ammunition had also been stolen from the Ikeja armoury.