DRC holds two days of mourning for fire victims

BUKAVU – Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila yesterday declared two days of mourning for 235 people who burned to death when a fuel truck exploded and reduced homes to ashes.

Flags flew half mast around the the country yesterday and today ‘in memory of the brothers and sisters brutally taken from us’, Kabila said in a message broadcast on national radio and television.Most of the dead, including around 60 children and 30 women, were buried in three mass graves late Saturday in Sange, where flames engulfed dozens of earth-and-straw homes after the tanker overturned the day before.The toll rose to 235 on Sunday after three people badly burned by the fire died overnight, said the governor of Sud-Kivu province, Marcellin Cishambo.The UN mission in DR Congo, Monusco, said nearly 200 people were injured in the fire, with 32 suffering serious burns taken by helicopter to two hospitals in regional capital Bukavu to the north and Uvira to the south.Cishambo said 105 people were still in hospital and that a similar number had been able to go home after treatment, adding that the toll could rise as more people succumb to their injuries.The health minister visited some of the wounded in hospital and ‘left a tonne of medicines which he had brought with him,’ while the social affairs and interior ministers also travelled to the region, the governor added.The UN-backed Okapi radio station reported that Uvira hospital was short of medicines and that the wounded had been forced to buy themselves supplies from pharmacies in the town.The accident had left people in the town of around 50 000 ‘very sad, very traumatised. Some of them are very stressed,’ local aid worker Emmanuel Umbwe told AFP on Sunday. – Nampa- AFP