Nearly 40,000 bombs cleared by US bomb experts

Some 39,800 unexploded ordnances have been cleared by United States bomb disposal experts from the site of a munitions depot which caught fire and killed hundreds in the Nigerian city of Lagos, in January.

A U.S. embassy statement said 3,000 of the bombs were detonated on site at the Ikeja military base where the disaster occurred. Another 36,800 explosives were taken away to a remote location in Ogun State in the south, where they were safely destroyed.

The team also cleared about three tons of "scrap metal" from the blast site to mark the conclusion of the assignment it began in February.

Under the assistance programme, which brought in a team of 58 bomb experts from the U.S. and two from Britain, a civilian defence contractor is expected to take up what is left of the assignment.

More than 1,000 people died in the munitions dump disaster, most of them women and children who drowned in a canal while fleeing missiles and rockets that 'rained' on their neighbourhood after massive blasts.

However, a report in 'Thisday' daily on Monday said the residents of Ajilete in Ogun, the nearest town to the off-site bomb disposal location, some 35 kilometres north of Lagos, had also suffered from the disposal activities.

The report quoted Oba Adeniyi Akinlade, the traditional chief of the town, as saying that many houses were damaged as blasts from the detonation exercise shook their foundations. "No less than 40 houses suffered one level of destruction or the other," he was quoted as saying.