No fewer than 143 people died, and dozens more went missing after a boat carrying fuel caught fire and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said Friday.
Hundreds of passengers were jammed onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC on Tuesday when the wildfire broke out, according to Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national MPs from the region.
The calamity struck near Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur Province, at the junction of the Ruki and the massive Congo River, the world’s deepest.
“A first group of 131 bodies was found on Wednesday, with a further 12 fished out on Thursday and Friday. Several of them are charred,” Lokumu told AFP.
According to Joseph Lokondo, a local civil society activist who helped bury the remains, the “provisional death toll is 145: some burnt, others drowned”.
According to Lokumu, the blaze was triggered by a fuel explosion sparked 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 said.
Videos circulating on social media showed flames leaping from a big boat stranded far from shore, smoke rising from the wreckage, and passengers on smaller vessels watching on.
The precise number of passengers on board the tragic vessel was unknown, but Lokumu estimated it to be in the “hundreds”.
Some people were rescued and admitted to the hospital, Lokondo added.
However, he said that “several families were still without news of their loved ones” on Friday.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a huge Central African nation spanning 2.3 million square kilometres (900,000 square miles), suffers from a shortage of passable roads, and planes serve just a few cities and villages.
As a result, people frequently travel on lakes, the Congo River (Africa’s second longest river after the Nile), and its winding tributaries, where shipwrecks are common and mortality tolls are high.
The persistent lack of passenger lists frequently hinders search activities.
In October 2023, at least 47 people perished when a boat travelling the Congo sank in Equateur.
According to local authorities, a boat sank on Lake Kivu in eastern DR Congo in October of last year, killing more than 20 persons.
Another shipwreck on Lake Kivu killed approximately 100 lives in 2019.
