143 people die in DR Congo boat fire

At least 143 people have died and dozens more have gone missing after a boat carrying fuel caught fire and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said on Friday.

Hundreds of passengers were crowded onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC on Tuesday when the blaze broke out, according to Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national deputies from the region.

The disaster occurred near Mbandaka, 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 was 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 said he helped bury the bodies, put the “provisional death toll at 145: some burnt, others drowned”.

The official toll of the tragedy was not yet known by midday Saturday.

Collective funerals were already underway in the provincial capital Mbandaka on Friday, according to videos filmed by local journalist Eric Liyenge Ekamba shared with AFP.

The footage showed vehicles arriving with coffins that were then transported by Red Cross workers and displayed under a large tent in an amusement park.

In another video, at least eleven coffins are seen under the tent as people walk around the site as if to pay their last respects.

In front of one coffin, a photo of a woman is displayed with the message: “Maman Bolangi Souzane, we will never forget you.”

After the ceremony, Red Cross workers and other volunteers carried out burials at an area cemetery, as seen in the footage.

Several families directly retrieved the bodies of their loved ones once they were found, according to testimonies.

– Search for missing –

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 added.

Videos circulating on social media showed flames leaping from a long boat stranded far from shore, with smoke billowing from the wreckage and people aboard smaller vessels looking on.

The total number of passengers on board the doomed vessel was not known but Lokumu said it was in the “hundreds”.

Some survivors were rescued and admitted to the hospital, Lokondo said.

But on Friday, he added, “Several families were still without news of their loved ones”.

Search efforts continued on Saturday, “but the chances of finding survivors or additional bodies are slim, three days after the tragedy”, a humanitarian source told AFP, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

A vast central African nation that covers 2.3 million square kilometres (900,000 square miles), the DRC suffers from a lack of practicable roads while planes serve only a limited number of cities and towns.

As a result people often travel on lakes, the Congo River — the second longest in Africa after the Nile — and its winding tributaries, where shipwrecks are frequent and the death tolls often heavy.

A chronic absence of passenger lists often complicates search operations.

In October 2023, at least 47 people died after a boat navigating the Congo sank in Equateur.

More than 20 people died in October last year when a boat capsized on Lake Kivu in eastern DRC, according to local authorities.

Another shipwreck on Lake Kivu claimed around 100 lives in 2019.