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BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Seeking a change in Africa
Colin Blane of the BBC reported from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: On the morning of May 29 1991 
Five of us had driven to report on a fire at an ammunition dump. As we tried to find cover to film from, there was an immense explosion, so huge that from two miles away one of my colleagues was killed, and another badly injured as debris rained down upon us for a full five minutes. It is hard to understand how any of us survived the blast.
The event Blane describes happened when he, a cameraman who lost an arm, and a sound man who was killed, went to Debre Zeit Road in Addis Ababa to check reports of civilian deaths. An ammunition dump had exploded after an EPRDF militiaman had fired an RPG into one of the ammunition bunkers the day before, killing civilians who were apparently engaged in looting.
When the TV news crew arrived they decided to proceed across country, and had just crossed into a dry creek bed, camera footage shows Blane walking ahead, almost hard against the steep high bank close to his right. Smoke was visible across the creek from the burning and still exploding ammo dump, then in the last instant recorded on tape, the earth trembled and the trees lay down flat. Just like they do in footage of nuclear bomb tests.
Blane was later to say he thought a nuclear device had exploded.
Colin Blane of the BBC reported from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: On the morning of May 29 1991Five of us had driven to report on a fire at an ammunition dump. As we tried to find cover to film from, there was an immense explosion, so huge that from two miles away one of my colleagues was killed, and another badly injured as debris rained down upon us for a full five minutes. It is hard to understand how any of us survived the blast.
The event Blane describes happened when he, a cameraman who lost an arm, and a sound man who was killed, went to Debre Zeit Road in Addis Ababa to check reports of civilian deaths. An ammunition dump had exploded after an EPRDF militiaman had fired an RPG into one of the ammunition bunkers the day before, killing civilians who were apparently engaged in looting.
When the TV news crew arrived they decided to proceed across country, and had just crossed into a dry creek bed, camera footage shows Blane walking ahead, almost hard against the steep high bank close to his right. Smoke was visible across the creek from the burning and still exploding ammo dump, then in the last instant recorded on tape, the earth trembled and the trees lay down flat. Just like they do in footage of nuclear bomb tests.
Blane was later to say he thought a nuclear device had exploded.
This device is likely connected to the broken arrows, two or three supposedly lost nukes jettisoned from a burning B52 off of the coast of the Horn of Africa in 1991, said to be the remnants of South Africa’s nuclear program.
The video does not appear to be available thru Google or Youtube. Seek it out, it is spectacular proof of atomic weaponry in the Ethiopian Arsenal as early as 1991.