At least 15 dead as explosions hit E.Guinea military camp
At least 15 people have already been killed and 500 injured after a series of powerful explosions hit a armed service camp in Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said, pointing the finger at “negligent” soldiers for the blast.
The TVGE channel broadcast footage of wrecked and losing buildings after the 4 explosions ravaged the Nkoa Ntoma camp in the financial capital Bata and the encompassing neighbourhoods.
People - including children - were seen being pulled from the rubble and the wounded lying about a hospital flooring, while a column of thick dark-colored smoke rose from the armed service site.
The explosions were due to “an accident because of the negligence of the machine responsible for storing explosives, dynamite and ammunition”, Obiang Nguema said in a statement continue reading state television.
His jet-setter son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, vice president with responsibility for defence and reliability, appeared in the tv set footage at the picture of the blasts inspecting the harm, accompanied by his Israeli bodyguards.
Teodorin, as he's known, is increasingly viewed as the president’s designated successor.
The camp, where in fact the first explosion struck in the early afternoon, houses among others components of the army’s special forces and the paramilitary gendarmerie, according to a journalist with TVGE.
Spain, the former colonial ability found in Equatorial Guinea, urged its residents via its Malabo embassy to stay at home following explosions.
Bata is the most significant city in the oil- and gas-rich central African nation, with around 800,000 of the nation’s 1.4 million human population living there - almost all of them in poverty.
While it sits about the mainland, the capital Malabo is in Bioko, among the country’s islands away the west African coastline.
Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by 78-year-good old Obiang Nguema for nearly 42 years.
In December this past year the UN’s top court found in favour of France in a bitter battle over a swanky Paris property seized in a corruption probe into his son Teodorin.
Opposition numbers and international organisations regularly accuse Obiang Nguema of committing human rights abuses.
The authoritarian head has seen off at least half a dozen assassination or coup attempts to be Africa’s longest-serving leader.
Malabo claimed to have foiled a good coup plot in December 2017 that 130 persons were sentenced to prison conditions which range from three to 96 years, one half of them in absentia.
They included five French nationals along with residents of Chad, the Central African Republic and Cameroon.
