A fuel truck exploded and set fire to a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), killing at least 221 people and injuring almost an equal number, the Red Cross said yesterday.
Flames engulfed dozens of earth and straw constructed homes after villagers, many of them children, crowded around the tanker which overturned late on Friday.
Helicopters provided by the UN mission in the country evacuated injured villagers to hospitals, officials said.
Desire Kama from the Congolese Red Cross said according to a provisional estimate at 11am, there were 221 deaths — including 61 children and 36 women — and 214 were injured.
A UN mission source said on condition of anonymity that five Pakistani troops were among the dead, but this was denied by the spokesman for MONUSCO (the UN peacekeeping force) Madnodje Mounoubai, who said no UN soldiers were among the victims.
A military source in MONUSCO's command said he had no reports of any victims from the peacekeeping mission and said verification was going on with units present in the zone.
Earlier a MONUSCO source gave a toll of “223 dead and 110 injured.”
“What is certain is that the toll will get higher. It seems that what happened was truly horrible,” the source said on condition of anonymity, adding that the search was still going on “for more charred bodies.”
“A tanker truck coming from Tanzania overturned in the village of Sange. There was a crush [of people] and a petrol leak, there was an explosion of fuel oil which spread through the village,” regional government spokesman Vincent Kabanga said.
The village is located about 70km south of the Sud-Kivu county town of Bukavu, close to the border with Burundi.
Dozens of homes in Sange were caught in the blaze after the accident, which a police officer based in Bukavu said had been caused by the truck's “excessive speed.”
The officer, who asked not to be named, added that many of those who surrounded the vehicle before it exploded were children.
He said the locals were trying to gather the oil from the tanker, when the explosion occurred, adding that Sange was now “in total mourning.”
A UN officer who arrived at the site yesterday morning said: “The bodies are charred. It's horrible, there are still flames above the truck.”
MONUSCO made available three helicopters to evacuate villagers and alerted hospitals in Uvira and Bukavu, a source in the mission said.
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