At least 15 lifeless as explosions hit E.Guinea military camp
At least 15 people have already been killed and 500 injured after some 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 burning buildings after the several explosions ravaged the Nkoa Ntoma camp in the financial capital Bata and the encompassing neighbourhoods.
People - including children - were seen getting pulled from the rubble and the wounded lying in a hospital flooring, while a column of thick black smoke rose from the armed service site.
The explosions were caused by “an accident as a result of negligence of the machine responsible for storing explosives, dynamite and ammunition”, Obiang Nguema said in a statement continue reading state television.
His jet-setter child, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, vice president with responsibility for defence and reliability, appeared in the television set footage at the scene of the blasts inspecting the destruction, 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 amongst others factors 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 remain at home following explosions.
Bata is the most significant city in the essential oil- and gas-rich central African nation, with around 800,000 of the nation’s 1.4 million population living there - almost all of them in poverty.
While it sits on the mainland, the administrative centre Malabo is on Bioko, one of the country’s islands away the west African coast.
Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by 78-year-good old Obiang Nguema for almost 42 years.
In December last year the UN’s leading 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 figures and international organisations regularly accuse Obiang Nguema of committing people rights abuses.
The authoritarian leader has seen off at least six assassination or coup attempts to be Africa’s longest-serving leader.
Malabo claimed to have foiled a coup plot found in December 2017 that 130 persons were sentenced to prison conditions ranging from three to 96 years, half of these in absentia.
They included five French nationals together with residents of Chad, the Central African Republic and Cameroon.
