(Bangui) At least 58 people died and others were missing on Friday in the sinking of an overloaded barge on the Mpoko River in Bangui while they were going to a funeral, according to a latest report on Saturday.
“We were able to extract 58 bodies, lifeless. We do not know the total number of people who are underwater,” declared the director general of civil protection, Thomas Djimasse, whose teams arrived on site 40 minutes after the tragedy, to Radio Guira.
The government did not react on Saturday to the assessment of civil protection. In a speech recorded on Friday, broadcast on public radio on Saturday, government spokesperson Maxime Balalou reported “a provisional toll of at least 30 people dead, missing and several injured”.
“The government sends its most saddened condolences to the bereaved families” he continued before announcing the opening of an investigation “to determine the causes of this tragedy as well as the responsibilities” and the establishment of a “system exceptional support for the families of the victims”, without further details.
Injured evacuated by motorcycle taxi
The wooden boat, called a whaleboat, was carrying more than 300 people, well beyond its capacity, and was heading to Makolo, a village 45 kilometers from Bangui, to attend the funeral of a village chief, they said. indicated witnesses.
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 took out the first victims, including his own sister, with help from fishermen and local residents, before help arrived.
Some injured people were evacuated using motorcycle taxis, like that of Francis Maka who told AFP that he had “taken 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.
Several opposition parties, such as the Movement for the Liberation of the Central African People, also expressed their “solidarity with the families” and the Republican Unity Party (UNIR), called for “national mourning”.
The Central African Republic is the second least developed country in the world, the UN indicated last year, and the scene since 2013 of a deadly civil war which has decreased in intensity since 2018.
At the end of 2020, the most powerful of the numerous armed groups which then shared two thirds of the territory had allied themselves within the CPC and launched an offensive on Bangui to try to overthrow the head of state, Faustin Archange Touadéra, which had called on Moscow to the rescue of its destitute army.