TWENTY-EIGHT people were burnt to death and 40 seriously injured in Tanzania when an overturned fuel tanker caught fire as villagers were stealing its petrol. Three people who initially survived the blaze died on Tuesday in hospital. Laurian Sanya, the regional police commander of Mbeya, said that one of two tankers travelling to neighbouring Malawi overturned on Monday in the village of Isongole and residents swarmed around to pilfer petrol. A villager reportedly tampered with the batteries of the vehicles, sparking the fire. “He must have wrongly connected the wires, thus causing sparks that ended up exploding into a lethal inferno,” Sanya said. The villagers had chased away the trucks’ crews who were trying to put the tanker back on the road and “even threatened to skin them alive”, Sanya said.