LAGOS, Feb 2: More than 30 people were killed in an explosion which demolished three apartment blocks and tore open a bank in central Lagos on Sunday, the Lagos state government said.

“As I’m speaking to you now there are over 30 bodies in the mortuary and there could still be many more dead in the debris,” Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu told journalists at the blast site.

He said police ballistics experts would launch an investigation to discover the cause of the blast. Local media described it as a bomb blast. Government officials said they were still trying to determine how it happened.

The blast ripped the front off the Prudent Bank building and witnesses saw people scavenging through the wreckage for cash and youths stashing bags of money into the boot of a car.

Emmanuel Ijewere, the head of the Nigerian Red Cross, earlier put the death toll at 21 and said 32 people were being treated in hospital. Four were in a critical condition.

He said the blast came from a three-storey building next to the bank.

The collapsed buildings housed a mixture of offices and residential flats in Lagos Island, the heavily populated commercial centre of Lagos, a crowded city of 12 million people.

The explosion resounded across Lagos at around 1000 GMT. Waves of panic seized the crowds in the narrow streets around the scene of the blast, near the central mosque.

“Rescue work is still going on. Some people may still be rescued,” Lagos State Commissioner of Information Dele Alake told journalists at the blast site. Local civilians and rescue services combed through the wreckage in search of the dead and injured.

A crowd of residents thronged the spot, but scattered when heavily armed police arrived, shooting in the air and shouting through a loudspeaker: “Let us through to help our brothers!”

The incident was the worst disaster in Nigeria since a fire gutted one of the main offices of Nigeria’s national oil firm in December. In January last year a fire at a Lagos arms depot caused more than 1,000 deaths.

Nigeria suffers bouts of inter-ethnic violence but is not known as a target of terror attacks.—Reuters