How Ticketing Staff Cheated Death

Ayorinde Oluokun/Abuja

A ticketing agent with the Abuja Urban Mass Transit Company, the operator of the high capacity buses affected by the Nyanya bus park bomb blasts, Isaac Onu, is another person who miraculously survived the blasts which had as at yesterday claimed 100 lives, causing life threatening injuries to many others and destroying over 50 vehicles.

He told P.M.NEWS that he owed his survival to the fact he actually disobeyed his boss who had asked him to stay at the entrance gate which is nearer to where the buses are parked in rows to sell tickets to approaching commuters when he resumed work early yesterday morning.

But he instead chose to stay near the exit gate where some commuters also use to gain access to the bus station.

The ticketing agent said he heard a very loud explosion which deafened him temporarily less than 30 minutes after he arrived at his choice location which is a few metres to where the buses are boarded.

This, according to him, was accompanied by a huge fire ball and flesh of people flying in the air.

He told P.M.NEWS that four buses of the company were loading at the time of the blast.

Isaac who was trying to contact his missing colleagues, some of whom he said resumed work as ticketing officers on Monday morning, was unhurt despite the fact that some of the scraps from the rigged vehicle landed near  where he was standing at the time of the incident.

“I just saw people falling, vehicles catching  fire everywhere. I could not do anything,” said the ticketing agent.

Isaac told P.M.NEWS that scores of his colleagues who were selling tickets at the initial place he was asked to stay were still unaccounted for as at late afternoon yesterday.

Another ‘miraculous’ survivor of the blast is a driver of a Toyota Sienna space bus which, as was gathered, was already fully loaded with seven passengers and was about to drive off to its destination before the blast went off.

P.M.NEWS learnt that all the passengers in the Sienna bus, one of the vehicles completely burnt during the blast died, except the driver.

Investigations by P.M.NEWS revealed that the Sienna bus was directly in front of the Golf car in which the bomb was rigged.

Though he lost all his passengers, the driver sustained a minor injury on his shoulder for which he was taken for treatment at Asokoro General Hospital.

It was not clear if he sustained any internal injury but he kept bemoaning his loss. When he was asked his name, he kept muttering in pidgin English: “everybody don die..na only me survive…everybody don die…my Sienna spoil..my papers….everybody die….”  which he repeated over and over.