Villagers and a government boat crew pulled out more victims on Friday from a ferry disaster that has already proven one of Africa’s deadliest, with many of the 182 bodies recovered so far buried in thick forests surrounding the Congo River lake where they drowned.
With scores of other passengers and crew members still missing, families agonise three days after the two overcrowded vessels collided in a violent storm.
”Our sorrow is even greater because we don’t know if they are alive or dead,” said Nkande Pape Bolawe, whose family lost two men.
”Now, we think it’s impossible to find them alive — we’re waiting at least for the bodies,” Bolawe said.
More than 3 000 people crowded a cathedral in the lakeside town nearest the disaster site, Inongo, on Friday morning, celebrating a Mass in memory of the victims.
On both sides of Mai-Indombe lake, recovery crews placed the bodies of men, women and children on mats, arranging the dead three to four to a grave in dense groves lining the shores.
The Dieu Merci and another boat smashed together in a violent gale on Tuesday night, throwing the 450 to 500 fishermen, traders and other travellers into the wind-whipped waves.
The government says 222 escaped, many of them saved by villagers who paddled to their rescue in wooden fishing canoes. Survivors spoke of clinging to metal drums in waves that aid workers said reached up to 2m high.
Survivor Mabaka Gerada, a 26-year-old trader who been travelling the 450km from the capital, Kinshasa, said on Friday that both vessels broke up in the strong waves.
Villagers and a single government-provided boat crew hauled more dead from the water on Friday. Other victims were recovered from where they had washed ashore many kilometers away.
Passengers said only 30 people had been recorded on one boat’s written manifest — making it unlikely a precise death toll will ever be determined. By the government’s account of the numbers of survivors and its estimate of the numbers aboard, the toll appears likely to go well above 200.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) government reopened the Congo River to commercial traffic in April after closing it during the country’s nearly five-year war, fearing rebels could use it to move on Kinshasa.
A nation the size of Western Europe, the war-ravaged, underdeveloped DRC has only a few hundred kilometers of paved roads, making the Congo River and its tributaries lifelines of the vast country’s commerce.
In March, another overloaded ferry sank in Lake Tanganyika in the DRC’s far east, killing 111. Forty-one others survived.
Africa’s worst ferry accident occurred on September 26 2002, when Senegal’s state-run ferry — carrying nearly four times its intended capacity — overturned in a gale in the Atlantic Ocean.
Then, 1 863 died when the MS Joola capsized, making it a deadlier accident than the sinking of the Titanic and the world’s second-worst maritime disaster to date. Sixty people survived. — Sapa-AP