Unicef official Isaac Oladipo Aladeloye said that the agency was trying to find ways to provide them with drugs. We are here to assess the situation to enable us to take action. It is driven by poverty and greed. The explosion follows a series of fires in the Adeje area caused by the frequent vandalisation of a pipeline carrying vital fuel supplies to northern Nigeria. A special police task force, set up to combat petrol thieves who steal from supply lines to sell on the black market, has been fighting an uphill battle.
Youths involved in the racket are increasingly well armed.
There are few other opportunities for them to gain a livelihood in the impoverished oil-producing parts of southern Nigeria. The region was long neglected by former regimes despite its overwhelming contribution to central government revenues. A recent nationwide fuel scarcity, meanwhile, has brought with it an upsurge in black market profiteering. But a tragedy on the scale of what has happened at Adeje has only once occurred before - in 1998 when up to 1,000 people died in an explosion at the nearby village of Jesse.