The death toll from the explosion of a petrol tanker truck in Nigeria that killed people rushing to gather fuel has risen to 86, emergency services said on Sunday.
The truck carrying 60,000 litres of gasoline exploded after flipping over on a road in the centre of the country on Saturday, authorities said. Rescuers had previously put the toll at 70 dead.
"We buried 86 burnt corpses between 12:00pm yesterday to 2:00am, local time, of today," said Ibrahim Audu Husseini, spokesman for the Niger state's emergency management agency.
"It took us 14 hours to bury the bodies because we couldn't get excavators and had to get locals to dig the mass grave manually."
Another 52 people suffered "severe burns from the explosion," he added. The blast struck at the Dikko junction on the road linking the federal capital Abuja to the northern city of Kaduna.
A crowd of people rushed to the spot where the tanker had turned over in search of fuel, whose price has soared in an economic crisis.
