At least 269 people are reported to have been killed in a fire at a vandalised oil pipeline in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.
The explosion followed occurred in the Abule Egba area of the city in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
"The number of dead is confirmed at 269. We have retrieved all the bodies," said Abiodun Orebiyi, secretary-general of the Nigerian Red Cross.
He said that 60 people had been taken to hospital with serious burns.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Stella Din, a journalist at the scene, said that local officials and Red Cross workers had prepared a mass burial site.
"Residents woke up this morning to a massive inferno and saw hundreds of bodies," she said.
Pipeline fractured
Witnesses said that unidentified people had tapped the pipeline for fuel, transferring it into several tanker trucks.
They said the explosion occurred afterwards as local residents crowded in to take petrol for themselves.
"They came and tapped the pipeline, filled the tankers with the fuel and went away with them," said Joe Okah, a witness.
"Then people here who were suffering came to fill jerrycans and then there was the explosion."
Local television stations ran messages advising residents living in neighbourhood close to the blast to leave.
Those who were burned were taken to hospital in Ikeja, another northern suburb.
Explosions at oil pipelines, often causing large numbers of casualties, are not uncommon in oil-rich Nigeria.
In October 1998, a pipeline explosion killed 1,082 people and injured hundreds more at Jesse in the Niger Delta, and 300 were killed in July 2000 in the same area.