“Four bodies have been recovered. At this stage, 79 people have survived and around forty are missing.“, the deputy governor of Kwango province, Rémy Saki, told AFP. The search continued in the evening, in difficult conditions: “It will take a day or two to locate the whaler, try to free the barge and see if there are still bodies stuck.“, Mr. Saki continued.
The sinking of the boat carrying some 150 passengers, according to testimonies collected by the authorities, took place in the morning on the Kwango River, a sub-tributary of the Congo River.The whaler hit a bridge“in circumstances which have not yet been determined,” explained the mayor of the village of Pont Kwango, Jean-Baptiste Nkololo.According to the passengers, there were about 150 people on board. There are less than a hundred survivors, the others are under water.” he lamented.
A vast country in central Africa, the DRC has very few passable roads and travel is often on lakes as well as on the Congo River and its tributaries, where shipwrecks are frequent. The tolls are often heavy. At least 25 people died at the end of July in the sinking of a whaling boat on the Congo River, in the province of Maniema (central-east). In 2019, a shipwreck on Lake Kivu (east) left around a hundred dead. The chronic absence of a passenger list complicates search operations.
