By Nima Elbagir
Khartoum - An explosion at an ammunition dump in a military training centre in the south Sudanese town of Juba killed 24 people on Wednesday as artillery shells rained down on large parts of the town, the interior ministry said.
An army statement said the blast was caused by a warehouse fire and said it did not believe "hostile action" was involved. Juba stayed in government hands throughout southern Sudan's two decades of civil war, with a large garrison to protect it from rebels.
"The extreme rise in temperature led to the explosion of an ammunition dump in the city of Juba at 12:30pm which led to the death of 24 people," a police statement released by the interior ministry said.
The statement said five people were injured, but aid workers in Juba and another Sudanese official said the number of injured was 30 or more.
"It's a bloody mess. There are bodies that have been burnt to nothing. There's unexploded ordnance everywhere and almost half of the city has been blown up," said one aid worker, who asked not to be named.
The police statement said explosions lasted for an hour and a half, burning an area known as the customs market in the west of the town and damaging several neighbourhoods and official offices. But it said the situation was under control.
"It looks like a war zone," said another aid worker, who also asked not to be named. "Shells were falling within an area four kilometres in diameter," she added.
Gemma Mortensen, a British journalist who was visiting the town, said: "The sky just ignited and shells started firing themselves."
An unexploded anti-aircraft missile two metres long landed outside the compound of the United Nations Children's Fund Unicef, she added.
General Abbas Abdel-Rahman al-Khalifa, Sudanese armed forces spokesperson, said in a statement that a fire had started in one of the live ammunition warehouses, leading to the blasts.
"We consider it unlikely that this is the result of any hostile action," Khalifa said.
One aid worker quoted witnesses as saying they had seen between 15 and 20 bodies. Another aid worker in Juba said there were between 30 and 70 wounded so far.
Aid workers said cellphone lines were down in the town because a cellphone antenna had been damaged, making communication with residents in Juba difficult.
A Sudanese official said the government council for co-ordination of the southern states was meeting in Khartoum to discuss relief efforts.
The Sudan Radio Service, a United States-funded station based in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and broadcasting to southern Sudan, said houses in the area were burnt to ashes and some shells fell in the offices of a charity organisation.
The government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement signed a peace agreement in Nairobi in January.
Mortensen said army officers were speculating that the ammunition dump ignited accidentally because of a recent spell of hot weather and because of poor storage methods.