Almost a hundred people were killed in a tanker truck explosion in Sierra Leone.
According to the civil protection agency, 98 people were killed and another 92 injured after a tanker truck was rammed by a truck at a gas station in the capital Freetown and exploded on Friday evening.
The flames spread to the surrounding neighborhood.
Most of the victims were, according to eyewitnesses, street vendors and motorcyclists who had rushed to the crashed tanker truck to catch spilled fuel.
Charred bodies were found in burned-out cars near the site of the accident.
The President of the West African country, Julius Maada Bio, said he was “deeply shocked by the tragic fire and the terrible loss of human life”.
Hundreds of people gathered at the scene of the accident, many of them looking for missing relatives, an AFP correspondent reported.
The United Nations Office in Sierra Leone condensed the bereaved and asked the authorities for assistance.
The former British colony of Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world despite its diamond-rich soil.
Accidents with tankers are not uncommon in Africa.
Time and again, people are killed in fires while trying to divert fuel.
Most recently, 13 people died in a "giant fireball" in Kenya in July when they tried to drain fuel from an overturned tanker truck.
In 2019, around a hundred people died in a similar accident in Tanzania.