The death toll from the Onitsha fuel tanker fire has increased to six, as three more corpses were recovered from one of the shops razed in Wednesday’s conflagration in Anambra’s commercial capital.
This brings the total number of dead persons in the inferno to six, including a pregnant woman and her child, and a man who died yesterday.
Also destroyed by the fire were six plazas, 100 shops and residential houses worth over ₦1 billion.
The President of Ochanja Central Market, Chief Nelson Ojukwu, and a patron of the market, Mr. Ifeanyi Iloka, said the fire lasted all night till Thursday morning without any intervention by the fire service. They say that market leaders and traders had to pay for water tankers used to put out the fire and stop it from spreading to other shops.
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Traders have lost about ₦1billion worth of goods and property to the fire, the market leaders say, appealing to the government to provide fire-fighting trucks to the market.
Meanwhile, Governor Willie Obiano has visited the scene of the fire at Upper Iweka, but not Ochanja Market where the main disaster occurred due to fears of possible attack by traders who have been casting aspersions at the Governor, blaming him for not intervening in stopping the disaster.
