Blast rocks Botswana capital
NZPA-Reuter Gaborone, Botswana
A huge blast, believed to be a bomb, rocked the Botswana capital of Gaborone yesterday, killing one person and injuring an unknown number of others, said the police. They said no other details were immediately available but informed sources said the blast went off just before noon near a primary school for children of expatriates.
The explosion shook most of the city and was heard for several kilometres round.
It was the second explosion in Gaborone in three months. On February 13 a bomb wrecked the house of two South African refugees, a journalist, Nat Serache, and Gabriel Pula, injuring both. The two have since fled into neighbouring blackruled states after the Government expressed fears for their safety. A month ago the police said they had found a huge arms cache concealed in Soviet and Chinese containers.
Meanwhile in Krake, Benin, a senior police official has said that
some illegal immigrants who tried to cross the frontier this week to get out of Nigeria died in the attempt.
Commander Jean Bocco Tossou, the head of a mobile police unit sent to Krake, said several aliens died at Krake, a village on the Benin-Nigeria border when Nigerian border guards opened fire. He did not know how many people died.
Witnesses said Nigerian frontier guards opened fire in an apparent attempt to avoid being crushed by aliens rushing across the border. They said they saw
bodies loaded onto trucks by the guards. In Lagos, Nigeria denied that its security forces shot any aliens on their way out of the country. “Nothing of the sort happened,” said the Information Minister, Mr Samson Omeruah.
On April 15, Nigeria ordered 700,000 illegal immigrants to put their papers in order or leave by May 10. It reopened land borders to let them out but closed the frontiers again when the deadline expired.
Thousands stranded inside the country were told to leave the borders and return to a transit camp near Lagos to await sea passage home.
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Press, 16 May 1985, Page 6
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337Blast rocks Botswana capital Press, 16 May 1985, Page 6
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