Nigeria blasts toll reaches 1,000

LAGOS, Nigeria -- The death toll from last weekend's disaster at an army weapons dump in Lagos has risen to more than 1,000, officials have said.

Most of the dead and missing are children who drowned in a canal during a stampede from the scene of a series of huge explosions on Sunday.

Nigeria's Home Affairs Commissioner Musiliu Obanikoro, speaking on the private Lagos radio station Rhythm on Saturday, said: "From everything I have seen, as more bodies have been found over the days, the number of people who are deceased is now over 1,000 people."

Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu told Reuters: "We have almost completed the search for the bodies in the swamp.

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"More than 1,000 in total have been registered as dead."

The Nigerian Red Cross, which has reunited 1,800 children with their parents and is feeding 11,500 people displaced by the blasts, says 460 people remain unaccounted for.

The disaster is believed to have started when a fire erupted triggering a series of explosions that lasted for hours.

The blasts spread shells and flaming debris for kilometers around the army depot in the northern Ikeja neighborhood of Nigeria's crowded commercial capital.

The military is set to hold an inquiry into why such a large arms depot had been stationed in the heart of a residential area.

The Red Cross has set up two camps in the area for displaced people.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo called it a monumental tragedy and demanded answers.

"There is the normal thing that we do, or that the military will have to do, which is when a situation like this occurs, the military must carry out an inquiry," he said.