A total of 86 people have died after a petrol tanker truck overturned and exploded in Niger state. Most of the victims were impoverished local residents who had rushed to scoop up the spilled petrol, local authorities said. The price of fuel in Nigeria has gone up by 400 percent since Nigeria’s president ended decades-old subsidies.

The truck carrying 60,000 litres of petrol exploded after flipping over on a road in the centre of the country on Saturday, Nigerian authorities said.

“The final death toll from the tanker explosion is 86,” said Ibrahim Audu Husseini, spokesman for the Niger state’s emergency management agency.

“We buried 86 burnt corpses between 12:00 pm yesterday to 2:00 am of today,” he said, updating an earlier toll of 70.

“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.”

He said 52 other people suffered “severe burns from the explosion”.

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.

Kumar Tsukwam, the Federal Road Safety Corps sector commander for Niger state, said in a statement: “A large crowd of people gathered to scoop fuel despite concerted efforts to stop them.”

President Bola Tinubu expressed “deep sorrow over the fuel tanker explosion”, a statement from his office said Sunday.

He ordered a national campaign to “raise public awareness about the severe risks and environmental dangers of scooping fuel from fallen tankers”.

Such accidents have become common in Africa’s largest oil producer, which is grappling with its worst cost of living crisis in a generation.

The price of petrol in Nigeria has soared more than 400 percent since Tinubu scrapped a 50-year-old subsidy when he came into office in May 2023.

In October, 147 people died in a similar accident in Jigawa state, one of the worst such tragedies in Nigeria.

In 2020, the Federal Road Safety Corps listed 1,531 fuel tanker accidents which claimed over 535 lives.