MALABO, Equatorial Guinea, March 8, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – At least 15 people
have been killed and 500 injured after a series of powerful explosions hit a
military camp in Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said,
pointing the finger at “negligent” soldiers for the blast.
The TVGE channel broadcast footage of wrecked and burning buildings after
the four explosions ravaged the Nkoa Ntoma camp in the economic capital Bata
and the surrounding neighbourhoods.
People — including children — were seen being pulled from the rubble and
the wounded lying on a hospital floor, while a column of thick black smoke
rose from the military site.
The explosions were caused by “an accident due to the negligence of the
unit in charge of storing explosives, dynamite and ammunition”, Obiang Nguema
said in a statement read on state television.
His jet-setter son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, vice president with
responsibility for defence and security, appeared in the television footage
at the scene of the blasts inspecting the damage, accompanied by his Israeli
bodyguards.
Teodorin, as he is known, is increasingly seen as the president’s
designated successor.
The camp, where the first explosion struck in the early afternoon, houses
among others elements of the army’s special forces and the paramilitary
gendarmerie, according to a journalist with TVGE.
Spain, the former colonial power in Equatorial Guinea, urged its citizens
via its Malabo embassy to stay at home following the explosions.
Bata is the largest city in the oil- and gas-rich central African nation,
with around 800,000 of the nation’s 1.4 million population living there —
most of them in poverty.
While it sits on the mainland, the capital Malabo is on Bioko, one of the
country’s islands off the west African coast.
Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by 78-year-old Obiang Nguema for nearly 42
years.
In December last year the UN’s top court found in favour of France in a
bitter battle over a swanky Paris property seized in a corruption probe into
his son Teodorin.
Opposition figures and international organisations regularly accuse Obiang
Nguema of committing human rights abuses.
The authoritarian leader has seen off at least half a dozen assassination
or coup attempts to become Africa’s longest-serving leader.
Malabo claimed to have foiled a coup plot in December 2017 for which 130
people were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 96 years, half of
them in absentia.
They included five French nationals as well as citizens of Chad, the
Central African Republic and Cameroon.