Kinshasa (AFP) – The mayor of the DR Congo town near where a boat caught fire earlier this week told AFP on Saturday that at least 33 people had died in the disaster, significantly fewer than previously reported.
More than 200 passengers were crowded onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC on Tuesday when the blaze broke out, said the mayor of Mbandaka, Yves Balo.
"We count 195 who have survived, including 22 burn victims who are being cared for at Wangata general hospital, and 33 deaths, with 29 people already buried and four more still at the morgue," Balo told AFP.
The disaster occurred near Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur Province, at the confluence of the Ruki and the vast Congo River -- the world's deepest.
The mayor's toll, the first official one from the blaze, was far lower than that of at least 143 deaths previously given to AFP.
Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national deputies from the region, had put the toll at 143.
And Joseph Lokondo, a local civil society leader who said he helped bury the bodies, put the "provisional death toll at 145: some burnt, others drowned".
Bako said the discrepancies over the death tolls were due to people having confused the numbers from previous disasters, which are frequent on the Congo River.
He was speaking after having met deputy interior minister Eugenie Tshiela, who flew into Mbandaka from the capital Kinshasa on Saturday.
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 added.
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.
Search efforts continued on Saturday, "but the chances of finding survivors or additional bodies are slim, three days after the tragedy", a humanitarian source told AFP, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
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. 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.