“[Currently] the toll is 61 dead, men, women and children [and] 52 injured who have been evacuated,” Marc Manyonga Ndambo, director of the infrastructure at the SNCC train operator, told AFP news agency on Saturday.
Local media quoted the provincial governor, Fifi Masuka, as saying 60 people had been killed.
It was a freight train which was carrying “several hundred stowaways”, said Manyonga.
“Some of the bodies were still trapped in the wagons that had fallen into the ravines,” he added.
Manyonga said the train was made up of 15 wagons, 12 of which were empty. It was coming from Luen in a neighboring province destined for the mining town of Tenke, close to Kolwezi, the capital of Lualaba province in southern DRC.
It derailed at 11:50 pm (21:50 GMT) on Thursday near the village of Buyofwe, about 200km (125 miles) from Kolwezi, “at a place where there are ravines”, into which seven of the 15 wagons fell, he said.
“My team is working hard to clear the track by Monday,” Manyonga added. He did not say how the crash had happened.
Train derailments are common in the DRC, as are shipwrecks of overloaded boats on the country’s lakes and rivers.
Last October, nine people died after a train derailed in the city of Kenzenze in the territory of Mutshatsha in the same province.
In 2019, at least 24 people were killed and 31 injured in an accident when a freight train carrying stowaways derailed in the Bena Leka settlement in Kasai province.
MA/PR
Your Comment