DR Congo: Up to 100 killed in Goma petrol-station blast

Nairobi/Goma (dpa) - The death toll in Monday's explosion at a petrol-station in the eastern Congolese town of Goma has risen to up to 100, a spokesman for the rebels controlling the region said.
He said looters caused the inferno in eastern Congo's largest city that was hit by eruptions from Mount Nyiragongo last week.

The situation for 300,000 people returning to Goma worsened Monday. They started coming back to the town Sunday ignoring stern warnings against further volcanic eruptions and only 5,000 sought shelter in the emergency camps set up in neighbouring Rwanda, U.N. officials said.

Aid workers tried in vain to guide further volcano victims to the camps that are located about 20 kilometres away.

"We are now trying to motivate the people to go to the camps by distributing emergency rations at the wayside," World Food Program (WFP) spokeswoman Laura Melo said Monday.

Meanwhile, both local and international aid workers criticised the U.N. agency's food distribution policy. Melo confirmed that 1,000 tons of food stand untouched in a WFP warehouse in Goma while tens of thousands of people are starving there.

"If we start handing out food here, this will work like a magnet and the remaining refugees will feel encouraged to come to Goma, Melo said in justifying the WFP's attitude.

U.N. agencies are now seeking a means of dealing with the flow of repatriates. They are earnestly pointing to the danger of further eruptions of Nyiragongo - just ten kilometres away - the lava of which killed at least 45 people Thursday. Tremors are still occuring at regular intervals.

Eyewitnesses report a spread in looting in Goma. Monday's petrol station blast took place when a crowd of between 60 and 100 tried to siphon off fuel from the tanks.

Apparently they caused a petrol spill that was ignited by the hot lava from the volcano. The ball of fire was still raging Monday afternoon.

UNICEF, the U.N. children's relief agency, fears that hundreds of children lost their parents in the confusion of Thursday's mass flight. It estimates that the Nyiragongo volcano had put about 350,000 people to flight.

About 200,000 were children, half of them under five years old, UNICEF said in a statement from the Kenyan capital of Nairobi Monday.

It said it is airlifting another 60 tons of relief goods from Copenhagen for the volcano victims in eastern Congo. "The relief goods will be flown to Kigali and then trucked to where they are most urgently needed," the agency added.

The goods include drinking-water, medicine, plastic tarpaulins and children's blankets.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine and his British counterpart Jack Straw meanwhile flew together to Central Africa Monday to hold talks with Congolese leaders after last week's Nyiragongo eruption.

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Received by NewsEdge Insight: 01/21/2002 10:10:07