LAGOS (AFP) - Forty people have now died as a result of a building collapse at the megachurch of one of Nigeria's most famous preachers and televangelists, the country's main rescue body said on Sunday.

"It's now 40 dead," Ibrahim Farinloye, southwest coordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency (Nema), told AFP by text message.

Some 124 people were rescued alive from the rubble of the building, believed to be a guesthouse for foreign followers of TB Joshua's The Synagogue Church of All Nations, in the Ikotun area of Lagos.