A nine-year-old girl has been identified as the culprit of the arson that reduced Ebeano supermarket in Abuja to ashes and black powder.

The girl, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans was captured in a Close Circuit Television CCTV footage setting fire to some goods arranged under some cooking gas cylinders on a shelf. 

After perpetrating the crime which happened at around 7:00 pm, she walked briskly away from the scene of the incident.

The blob of fire she left behind exploded leading to an inferno that engulfed the supermarket, razing down the multi-million naira shopping mall all night and into the early hours of the next day.

In another video that captured the young girl during interrogation, she confessed that her mother took her to the supermarket.

The girl said her mother wanted to buy drinks for her sister at another section of the supermarket before she left them for the gas section in the supermarket.

She still has on her the same clothes she wore to the shop on the day of the arson, as captured on CCTV.

It is unclear if the questioning was carried out on the same day.

However, another CCTV footage showed the 9-year old in the company of two other young women outside the supermarket about 30 minutes after the fire started. The girls appeared in the video to be smiling.