No fewer than seven people were injured when a one storey warehouse collapsed around Kasuwan Gwari area of Minna in Niger State yesterday evening.
Eyewitnesses said the building fell when a trailer was off-loading soft drinks to be kept therein. The warehouse belongs to a trader that brings bulk soft drinks to supermarkets in Minna.
It was gathered that more than 23 traders had offloaded assorted drinks into the building from Friday morning till the time it went down.
Sources said the seven inured people who were later evacuated were the workers offloading the drinks into the warehouse.
While some of sources said three people died, government sources maintained that the seven people evacuated were still alive and were receiving treatment in a government hospital in Minna.
Mohammed Ay, an electronic technician who said he was there when the building collapsed, said he saw about seven people being evacuated.
The general manager, Niger State Urban Development Board, Architect Bako Mohammed who was at the scene said; “It is a case of an illegal conversion of a structure to a warehouse, you can see what is happening now, our machines are coming and we are pulling the entire structure down.”
Spokesman of Niger State Emergency Management Agency (NSEMA) Hussaini Ibrahim said seven injured people were evacuated while no death was confirmed at press time.
He said it is only when the debris is cleared by the urban development board that the true casualty figure would be established.
