Blasts at arms depot leave 96 dead

MOZAMBIQUE declared three days of national mourning yesterday after an explosion at an arms depot in the capital Maputo killed nearly 100 people and injured hundreds more, many of them children.

Exploding bombs, mines and rounds of ammunition set off others around them in the country’s largest arms depot late Thursday, in a series of blasts that could be heard around the city.

“In Maputo hospitals, we registered 96 people dead and more than 400 injured,” health minister Ivo Garrido told a press conference.

Antonio Luis Assis da Costa, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Maputo Central Hospital, said doctors there had seen 223 patients since Thursday, 43 of whom were still hospitalised. “Most of them are people who have had amputations, head injuries and some burns.”

Government spokesman Luis Covane said an extraordinary cabinet meeting had decided to declare three days of national mourning, and to set up an independent commission of inquiry into the cause of the blasts.

A special ministerial task team, including the ministers of defence and social welfare, would also be created to consider what humanitarian assistance was required, he explained.

Explosives rocketed from the armoury, near the impoverished neighbourhood of Magoanine, landing on nearby houses which went up in flames, causing residents to flee in panic.

Soaring daytime temperatures are thought to have caused the initial blast.

Firefighters at the sealed-off area used massive hoses to dampen down the area around the armoury, while army and civilian volunteers stacked up mortar shells which had landed in nearby houses. Buildings up to six miles away sustained damage and residents have been warned to stay away from their homes for the next seven days in case of secondary explosions.

Most of those injured were children, Bonifacio Antonio, spokesman for the country’s disaster management services said. “Very many of the casualties were children. There are so many children... a lot of children were running in the streets,” he said. They were frightened by the initial blast and then hit by the impact of subsequent explosions.

Rescue workers were removing body parts from a house, where neighbours said 13 members of one family had taken refuge from the explosions. They were all ripped to shreds when a mortar shell exploded on the house.

The explosion of 20 tonnes of obsolete arms and munitions is the fourth of its kind — with the highest number of deaths and injured — since the armoury was built in the 1980s during the country’s violent civil war. President Armando Guebeza vowed at the scene of the explosion that the government would relocate the armoury away from the city. “Naturally we have to accept what has happened and work to resolve the problem,” he said.

In Magoanine, hundreds of residents streamed towards the main road to catch buses into town. Many women and children carried small bags with belongings.

Red Cross programme director Eunice Mucache said eight residential neighbourhoods were affected.

“People are still being evacuated, there are houses destroyed,” she said. “The difficulty is now to locate people because there are lots of children who are lost.”