An AFP photo journalist at Ilado beach village, the scene of the explosion, saw mangled and decomposing corpses that had washed ashore being hurriedly buried by the officials.
"Graves are being dug in several places. Recovered corpses are immediately put in any of them after fumigation by health officials," said the journalist.
Nigeria’s police chief told journalists after a visit to the scene that about 130 victims from the explosion had been buried in a mass grave on Friday, and the Red Cross had found 17 other corpses on site that day.
The exact number of victims is unknown. Police put the toll between 150 and 200, while rescuers at the scene said it could be 250.
Rescue halted
The Nigerian Red Cross said it had halted its rescue work at the scene. "We did not recover a single injured person or survivor at the site. They all died," its secretary-general Abiodun Orebiyi, told AFP.
"We are not likely to return there again except if there is a fresh need for us. It is now left for the government to take up its responsibilities in the area," he said.
The victims are believed to have been tapping the pipeline, at a beach near Lagos, for fuel when the accident took place.
Lagos police chief Emmanuel Adebayo told reporters the victims were "pipeline vandals".
"None (of the fuel thieves) remains alive to tell us the story of how it started," said Commander Adebayo, in a statement.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was in Indonesia for a summit of eight developing countries (D-8) when the accident happened, was returning to Abuja after a brief stopover in Kampala, where he met Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni.
Lagos governor Bola Tinubu criticised the authorities, in particular the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), for failing to protect pipelines across the country.
"I have written to President Obasanjo about two weeks ago, anticipating that something like this can happen and requested for further casing of these pipelines," he said in a televised interview.
Protection negligible
An agency of the NNPC controls and maintains the pipelines, most of which are located in rural communities, and are rarely protected.
Nearly 2,000 people have died in more than a dozen pipeline explosions across the country, Africa's largest oil producer, between 1998 and 2003.
In the worst recorded incident, in October 1998, 1,082 people thought to have been siphoning off fuel died in Jesse, in the oil-rich southern Delta state, after a pipeline there erupted.
A few weeks ago, the thickly populated Oke-Odo community on the northern outskirts of Lagos narrowly averted disaster after petrol gushed freely for four days out of a vandalised pipeline before it was repaired.
The blazes are frequently caused by people trying to remove fuel illegally from pipelines, in a country which is rich in oil but where most of the population is extremely poor.