At least 21 people have died and several others are missing a day after a landslide in the eastern Democratic Republic (DR) of Congo.
The bodies of eight women and 13 children were discovered after the landslide hit a river in the locality of Bolowa on Sunday as people were washing clothes and cleaning kitchenware, said Voltaire Batundi, a civil society leader in the wider Masisi territory.
One person survived and has been taken to a health centre, he added.
“We think that maybe in the mud there are still other bodies,” he told Reuters news agency by phone.
Search efforts have continued on Monday, a spokesperson for the governor of North Kivu province, which includes Masisi, said.
Fabrice Muphirwa Kubuya, head of the Osso-Banyungu civil society group, said that “the landslide occurred at around midday in the village of Bulwa”, putting the provisional death toll at 30, as quoted by Anadolu Agency. He added that the mudslide may have been triggered by days of heavy rainfall.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has warned of a growing humanitarian catastrophe in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where fighting between government forces and armed groups has caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee.
UNHCR spokesperson, Matthew Saltmarsh, said on Friday the violence had prompted nearly 300,000 people to flee across the Rutshuru and Masisi territories of the DRC’s North Kivu province in February.
“Civilians continue to pay the heavy and bloody price of conflict, including women and children who barely escaped the violence and are now sleeping out in the open air in spontaneous or organised sites, exhausted and traumatised,” he told reporters in Geneva.
Expressing “great alarm”, Saltmarsh said the UNHCR and its partners were stepping up humanitarian assistance but that difficulties remain in accessing displaced people in some parts of North Kivu because of the violence.
In mid-January, the United Nations (UN) aid agency, OCHA, said 12 humanitarian organisations had been forced to limit their operations in parts of Ituri province because of increased attacks. —Reuters
