A witness to a fatal car fire near a beach in Auckland says there was an overpowering smell of fuel in the area moments before an explosion.<\/p>\n
Police have confirmed a body has been found next to a burnt out car in Muriwai on Tuesday morning with emergency services at the scene of the fire at Jack Butt Lane.<\/p>\n
Police said the fire had been extinguished and a person’s body was found next to the vehicle.<\/p>\n
Police said they were making enquiries on behalf of the Coroner.<\/p>\n
The witness, who did not want to be named, said she was walking her dogs at about 8am and noticed a man near the car.<\/p>\n
“I was just by the surf club, throwing the ball for the dogs and there was this man waiting by his car,” she said.<\/p>\n
“My dogs ran out to him to say hello and he seemed annoyed that they were there … I thought he might have had a shy dog in his car.”<\/p>\n
She said the man did not respond or acknowledge her when she apologised for her dogs approaching him.<\/p>\n
“And then I noticed a smell of gas in the air and I thought, where’s that from?”<\/p>\n
“It got stronger and stronger until I couldn’t breathe and I thought the surf club might of had a gas leak and was about to explode so I thought I need to get out of here!<\/p>\n
“I started running and got about 20 metres or so and there was a big boom and a fireball explosion behind me with the car on fire,” she said.<\/p>\n
The witness said she immediately called emergency services.<\/p>\n
The area has been cordoned off and police are carrying out a scene examination.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A witness to a fatal car fire near a beach in Auckland says there was an overpowering smell of fuel in the area moments before an explosion. Police have confirmed a body has been found next to a burnt out car in Muriwai on Tuesday morning with emergency services at the scene of the fire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13834,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13831\/revisions\/13834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}