At Least 143 Dead in DR Congo Boat Fire
AFP/APP
Kinshasa: At least 143 people have died, and dozens more are missing after a boat carrying fuel caught fire and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said Friday.
Hundreds of passengers were crowded onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC when the blaze broke out on Tuesday, according to Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national deputies from the region.
The disaster occurred near Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur Province, at the confluence of the Ruki and the vast Congo River, the world’s deepest.
“A first group of 131 bodies were found on Wednesday, with a further 12 fished out on Thursday and Friday. Several of them are charred,” Lokumu told AFP.
Joseph Lokondo, a local civil society leader who helped bury the bodies, put the “provisional death toll at 145: some burned, others drowned.”
Lokumu said the blaze was caused by a fuel explosion ignited by an onboard cooking fire.
“A woman lit the embers for cooking. The fuel, which was not far away, exploded, killing many children and women,” she explained.
Missing Loved Ones
The exact number of passengers on board the ill-fated vessel remains unknown, but Lokumu estimated it was in the “hundreds.” Some survivors were rescued and admitted to hospital, according to Lokondo.
However, by Friday, he added, “several families were still without news of their loved ones.”
The vast Central African nation of the Democratic Republic of Congo suffers from a lack of practicable roads, making travel often reliant on lakes, the Congo River, and its tributaries. This reliance increases the frequency of shipwrecks, and the death tolls from such accidents are often heavy.
A chronic absence of passenger lists has further complicated search operations. In October 2023, at least 47 people died after a boat sank in Equateur. More than 20 people died in October last year when a boat capsized on Lake Kivu in eastern DRC. Another shipwreck on Lake Kivu claimed around 100 lives in 2019.
