Nigerian bank guards detained for deadly blast

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Two security guards were detained in connection with a weekend bombing that flattened a bank building in Nigeria's commercial capital, killing at least 46 people, authorities said Thursday.

The two worked for a security company that guarded the Prudent Bank, a senior bank official said on condition of anonymity. Six other people, including the bank manager and five employees, arrested Wednesday for questioning were released, Lagos police spokesman Emmanuel Ighodalo said.

Ighodalo would not provide details surrounding the eight arrests.

After initially saying the blast was an accident, authorities on Wednesday reclassified the incident as a bombing after discovering explosives, including some not detonated, at the scene.

"It was a series of explosions which brought down these buildings," Henry Iduode of the police bomb squad told Lagos state Gov. Bola Tinubu during Tinubu's visit to the site.

Iduode said he believed the explosives were of a type not manufactured in Nigeria.

Some of the blast materiel discovered so far included commercial explosives typically used in blasting quarries, Ighodalo said Thursday.

Tests are continuing on other fragments, Ighodalo said.

"The bomb experts are still carrying out tests and we can't say conclusively at this time the exact nature of all the devices," he said.

Sunday's blast in a crowded residential and business district in the heart of Lagos destroyed buildings that housed the bank and dozens of apartments.

Search crews have recovered 36 bodies from the rubble so far, Demola Adejide of the national emergency management agency said.

"But we have also found body parts of people blown to pieces, so it's difficult to say how many people really died," he said.

Hospital workers say at least 10 people died later at hospitals, bringing the confirmed toll to 46.

The explosion scattered cash from the bank's deposits, and police arrested a number of young men for stealing the strewn money in the first hours after the blast.

Authorities are considering a number of motives for Sunday's blast, including whether the explosion was part of a plot to rob the bank.

"Whether it was deliberate or there is an underground market of explosives, these are questions for the police to answer," Tinubu said. "Is it a crime, a robbery, or politically motivated?"

Authorities have evacuated six buildings housing hundreds of people near the charred ruins to evaluate them for structural damage. Some severely damaged structures have been marked for demolition.

The blast occurred on Lagos Island, a crowded high-rise district of banks and other businesses packed side-by-side with poor, densely populated residential blocks. The island is one of two that, with the mainland, form this city of 12 million people.

Almost exactly a year earlier, on Jan. 27, 2002, a series of explosions at an army munitions depot in Lagos killed more than 1,000 people.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, with 120 million residents.