KINSHASA: At least 143 people died and dozens more went missing after a boat carrying fuel caught fire and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said Friday.

Hundreds of passengers were crowded onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC on Tuesday when the blaze broke out, according to Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national deputies from the region.

The disaster occurred near Mbandaka, capital of Equateur Province, at the confluence of the Ruki and the vast Congo river — the world’s deepest. A first group of 131 bodies were found on Wednesday, with a further 12 fished out on Thursday and Friday. Several of them are charred,” Lokumu told AFP.

Joseph Lokondo, a local civil society leader who said he helped bury the bodies, put the “provisional death toll at 145: some burned, others drowned”. Lokumu said the blaze was caused by a fuel explosion ignited by an onboard cooking fire.

A woman lit the embers for cooking. The fuel, which was not far away, exploded, killing many children and women”, she said. Videos circulating on social media showed flames leaping from a long boat stranded far from shore, with smoke billowing from the wreckage and people aboard smaller vessels looking on.

 Missing loved ones –
The total number of passengers on board the doomed vessel was not known but Lokumu said it was in the hundreds . Some survivors were rescued and admitted to hospital, Lokondo said.But on Friday, he added, “several families were still without news of their loved ones”.

A vast Central African nation that covers 2.3 million square kilometres (900,000 square miles), the DRC suffers from a lack of practicable roads and planes serve only a limited number of cities and towns.

As a result people often travel on lakes, the Congo River — the second longest in Africa after the Nile — and its winding tributaries, where shipwrecks are frequent and the death tolls often heavy. A chronic absence of passenger lists often complicates search operations.

In October 2023, at least 47 people died after a boat navigating the Congo sank in Equateur. More than 20 people died in October last year when a boat capsized on Lake Kivu in eastern DRC, according to local authorities. Another shipwreck on Lake Kivu claimed around 100 lives in 2019. AFP