HARARE – Four people were feared dead in an explosion at the Grain Marketing Board’s Lion’s Den Depot in Harare on Tuesday afternoon.
Emergency responders had pulled one body while three other workers were missing, feared buried under the rubble.
Outgoing Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement, Rtd Air Chief Marshall Perrance Shiri, flew to the scene by helicopter and said investigations are to be carried out by forensic experts, according to the ZBC.
Engineering experts will assess the extent of damage to a silo which took the most impact from the explosion, believed to have been caused by an electric fault.
The Lion’s Den is the country’s largest grain storage facility.
The explosion sparked a fire in the control tower and one of the silos.
Several concrete blocks forming the foundation of the silo’s escape route were ripped up and strewn metres away off the storage facility.
Witness Misheck Nyarubero, who stays a few hundred metres from the depot, told the ZBC he saw one body as he entered the damaged plant in search of victims.
The three other missing workers were believed to be trapped inside the silo whose valves opened up, and in the process released grain into the tunnel which is part of the escape routes.
