More than 300 people were on board the whaleboat at the time of the tragedy, and many victims are missing.
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At least 58 people died on Friday in the sinking of an overloaded barge on the M’poko River in Bangui (Central African Republic), the director general of civil protection announced on Saturday April 20. This assessment could still be revised upwards because “we do not know the total number of people who are underwater” declared on Radio Guira Thomas Djimasse, whose teams arrived on site 40 minutes after the tragedy.
At the time of the tragedy, the boat, called a whaleboat, was carrying more than 300 people – well beyond its capacity. She was heading to Makolo to attend the funeral of a village chief, witnesses said. The boat capsized shortly after leaving the pier according to Maurice Kapenya, a witness who followed it “in a small canoe”due to lack of space on board and rescued the first victims, including his own sister, with the help of fishermen and local residents, before help arrived.
Families search for the missing
Some injured people were evacuated using motorcycle taxis, like that of Francis Maka who told AFP he had “took more than ten people to the community hospital”. No definitive assessment is currently available. On Saturday, while the civil protection teams were no longer on the scene, families were still near the river, paying for the services of canoeists to search for their loved ones who were still missing, a journalist from the AFP.
The Central African Republic is the second least developed country in the world, the UN reported last year, and the scene since 2013 of a deadly civil war which has declined in intensity since 2018. At the end of 2020, the most powerful of the numerous armed groups who then shared two thirds of the territory had allied themselves within the CPC and had launched an offensive on Bangui to try to overthrow the head of state, Faustin Archange Touadéra, who had called on Moscow to the rescue of his army destitute.