More than 140 people died due to fire in boat carrying oil in Congo, many missing

Congo Boat Fire: At least 143 people died and dozens of people went missing due to fire and overturned boat carrying fuel oil in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials gave this information on Friday. According to Josephine-Pacific Lokumu, head of the delegation of national representatives of the region, hundreds of passengers were riding on a wooden boat on the Congo river at the northwest DRC on Tuesday, when the fire broke out.

The accident stopped near Mabandaka, the capital of Equator province and at the confluence of the River river, which is the deepest river in the world.

Lokumu told AFP, “131 bodies were found on Wednesday, while 12 more bodies were fired on Thursday and Friday. Many of them are burnt.” Local civil society leader Joseph Lokondo said that he helped to bury the bodies, saying that “temporarily death toll is 145: Some are burnt, others drowned.” Lokumu said that cooking fire on the fire ship caused the explosion in the oil. He said, “A woman lit a fire for cooking. The oil was present at a short distance away from it, causing many children and women to die.” In the video aired on social media, flames are seen coming out of a long boat trapped from the shore, smoke is coming out of the debris and people riding on small ships are watching.

Many missing

The total number of passengers aboard the crashed ship is not known, but Lokumu said that the number was in “hundreds”. Lokondo said that some survivors were rescued and admitted to the hospital, but on Friday, he said, “Many families were still looking for their families.” A huge Central African nation spread over 2.3 million square kilometers (900,000 sq mi), DRC suffers from a deficiency of practical roads and aircraft only serve a limited number of cities and towns.

As a result, people often travel on lakes (the second longest river in Africa after the River-Nil River) and its curved tributaries, where ships often sink and often have a large number of deaths.

The frequent lack of passengers’ list often complicates the search campaign. In October 2023, at least 47 people were killed by a sinking of a boat who sailing in the Congo in the equator. According to local officials, in October last year, more than 20 people were killed when a boat overturned on the Kivu lake at East DRC. In 2019, about 100 people lost their lives in another ship accident on Kivu Lake.