YAOUNDE, Cameroon-Equatorial Guinea on Monday praised Chinese medics for saving scores of people injured in explosions that rocked a military camp at the weekend.
The death toll from the blasts in the city of Bata has risen to 98, with hundreds wounded.
The blasts on Sunday involved ammunition stocks and explosives at the camp in the country's economic hub. They devastated buildings at the compound and houses in surrounding residential areas.
In a telephone conversation with the Chinese medical mission on Monday, Prime Minister Francisco Pascual Obama Asue thanked the Chinese doctors who provided care for those injured in the explosions and donated urgently needed medical supplies.
The Chinese medical mission, which has a branch in Bata, has been in Equatorial Guinea for 50 years. The city is home to 800,000 of the country's 1.4 million people, most of whom live in poverty despite the country's oil and gas wealth.
Vice-President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue said on social media on Monday: "At the moment, we deplore 98 dead and 615 injured."
An earlier toll reported by state television said 30 had died and 600 were injured.
State television has shown images akin to a war zone, in which rescue workers and civilians struggled to remove bodies from smoking ruins.
"My uncle, who is an officer at the camp, has just called to say that this morning he found the bodies of five members of his family, which were totally burned," said one Bata resident.
Another resident, Teodoro Nguema, said by phone: "We haven't slept all night-the houses were burning all night long and we kept hearing small explosions. Anyone living in a radius of two to four kilometers of the explosions has been unable to return home."
Three young children were brought out alive and taken to hospital, the reports said.
In a hospital in Bata, many wounded, some on the floor, received first aid.
Explosives neutralized
As of Monday, the explosion sites are out of danger, and the explosives neutralized, according to the local news site Ahoraeg.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has governed the Central African state for 42 years, said the government will hold an emergency meeting to look into how victims can quickly receive aid from Equatorial Guinea before international aid arrives. Investigations into the blast have begun, he said in a statement on Tuesday.
The vice-president said on Tuesday that investigations so far showed the blast may have begun when a farmer set fire to his plot to prepare it for food production and a breeze spread the flames to the nearby barracks where the high-caliber ammunition was stored.
The blasts come as Equatorial Guinea suffers a double economic shock because of the coronavirus pandemic and a drop in the price of crude oil, which provides around three-fourths of state revenue.
