A truck tanker explosion in Freetown of Sierra Leone has claimed the lives of dozens.

The event occurred Friday night in Wellington, an eastern suburb of the capital, following a collision between two trucks, one of which was carrying hundreds of liters of gasoline, according to the city's mayor, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, who verified the occurrence on her Facebook page.

The explosion, which damaged houses and other cars, killed numbers of people who had arrived with buckets and jerry cans to collect the petrol that had spilled following the incident.

The officials had said yesterday, the death toll might grow owing to the serious condition of some of the injured, who were taken to other hospitals.

CNN cited local sources and reported that the death toll was at least 98, which was still expected to increase.

“We have many burned corpses,” said General Brima Bureh Sesay, director of the National Disaster Management Agency, in a video posted on social networks from the scene of the incident.