The national emergency service said the explosion in the northern city led to the collapse of a building and the deaths.

Nine people were killed after a gas cylinder explosion led to the collapse of a building close to a popular market in Nigeria’s northern state of Kano, the national emergency service and witnesses said.

The incident happened on Tuesday in the Sabon Gari area of ​​the city, mostly populated by people who moved to Kano from elsewhere.

Mustapha Habib Ahmed, head of the National Emergency Management Agency, said a gas cylinder in a welding shop exploded, killing nine people. Emergency responders pulled bodies from the rubble during a search and rescue operation.

At a nearby school, parents rushed to pick up their children after news of the blast, witnesses said. There were no reported injuries among the school children.

Kano, renowned for centuries as a center for Islamic scholarship and a commercial hotspot in trans-Saharan trade, is the capital of the eponymous Nigerian state in the northwest region of the country.