KINSHASA, Sept 15, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Thirty-six people are missing after a
boat sank in the Congo river on the outskirts of Kinshasa, DR Congo police
said on Sunday.
The vessel, which was travelling to the capital, went down overnight in
Maluku commune, about 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the centre of the city.
Seventy-six people survived, police wrote on Twitter.
“The cause of the accident is not yet known,” police spokesperson Colonel
Pierrot-Rombaut Mwanamputu told AFP.
Lake and river transport is widely used in Democratic Republic of Congo as
the highway system is poor, but accidents are common, often caused by
overloading and the unsafe state of vessels.
The boat involved was called a “baleiniere” or “whaler” — a commonly-used
flat-bottomed vessel between 15 to 30 metres (50 to 100 feet) long by two to
six metres wide.
In the vast majority of accidents, passengers are not equipped with life
jackets and many cannot swim.