'220 dead' in oil tanker explosion

A tanker truck has exploded in a massive fireball after overturning on a rural eastern Congo highway, killing about 220 people.

The victims included 61 children and 36 wmen, and included many who had been watching the World Cup in flimsy roadside shacks, the Red Cross and local officials said.

Witnesses said dozens of people had descended on the truck to siphon fuel illegally from the wreckage with jerry-cans and plastic buckets, apparently unaware of the danger.

UN peacekeepers rushed to evacuate more than 200 wounded from the scene by helicopter and ambulance, while Red Cross teams carried the charred bodies from the scene in body bags and buried them in two mass graves a few miles away.

The truck overturned as it was trying to pass a minibus near the village of Sange, around 20 miles north of Uvira, a town on the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika near the Burundi border, said Mana Lungwe, manager of the Congolese oil company that owns the truck. The vehicle began gushing oil, then burst into flames an hour later.

Lungwe said the driver was injured in the accident and taken to a local clinic before the blast occurred. Sange is located between Uvira and the Congolese provincial capital, Bukavu, further to the north.

As oil began leaking from the damaged tanker, Pakistani peacekeepers from a nearby U.N. base "came and told people to get away from the area, but people refused to leave," said Bedide Mwasha, a 45-year-old resident.

"Men, women and children, even (government) soldiers were stealing petrol," Mwasha said, adding that when night fell, one woman lit a kerosene lamp that may have ignited the blaze.

In Sange on Saturday, the remains of the white tanker's blackened wreckage lay tipped on its side, its tires burnt off, one small flame still leaping from the outside of the wrecked fuel container. Along the side of the road a few yards (meters) away, the remains of three wood and brick shacks smouldered where hundreds of people had gathered to watch the World Cup. The explosion took place in between matches, as people were watching television and milling outside.

Congolese Red Cross workers wearing masks over their faces to ward off the stench of smouldering flesh carried corpses away on stretchers.