Dozens of passengers have been killed in a rail accident in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) when the train they were riding crossed a bridge that knocked them off the top, a senior official said on Tuesday.
”There are dozens of dead, perhaps around 50,” said Koloso Sumaili, Governor of Maniema province where the accident took place on Monday. ”It’s horrible.”
Sumaili said that people sitting on top of the train, as often happens in African nations and other poor countries, were swept into the air when some of their luggage snagged on the beams of the bridge across the Lufulu river.
”Apparently, it was piles of goods they had stacked too high that caught on the bridge, falling off and taking passengers with it,” he said, adding that traders frequently take their goods from one place to another riding on trains.
The train had left Kindu, the chief town in the central Maniema province, for Lubumbashi, the provincial capital of Katanga in the south-east of the vast DRC, a country emerging from years of war and with scant transport infrastructure.
The bridge that claimed the passengers’ lives is about 160km south of Kindu. — Sapa-AFP