According to local officials, the blast occurred when someone lit a cigarette while residents were siphoning gas from a leaking tanker, Presidential spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said Thursday.
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The truck, traveling from Juba, the capital, overturned after it veered off a dirt road near Maridi in the country’s Western Equatorial state.
At first, provincial governor Patrick Raphael Zamoi cited a higher death toll of 176 with an unconfirmed amount of others critically injured. The station’s correspondent in the state also said that a military police vehicle and some soldiers that went to the site also reportedly suffered from burns.
He said the injured were taken to local hospitals which are overcrowded.
Medics are “not really able to calm down this pain”, Savior told the radio.
Around 100 people have died in South Sudan when a truck carrying petrol exploded, officials have told Al Jazeera.
“This was an accident”, he said, adding the tanker had veered off the road and later exploded with a crowd around it.
South Sudan became an independent country in 2011, after a peace deal with Sudan that ended Africa’s longest-running civil war.
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It has been mired in an internal conflict between government forces and rebels since 2013, having only gained independence in 2011.
