Death toll rises in Congo fuel tanker disaster

Sange: Survivors of an inferno that swept through a town in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, after a fuel truck exploded, began mourning officially on Monday for the 238 villagers who perished.

President Joseph Kabila, who declared two days of national mourning, left Kinshasa early on Monday to fly to the scene of Friday's disaster in Sange, a town of about 50,000 people near the border with Burundi.

The scope of the tragedy worsened on Monday after three people died from the severe injuries they suffered in the blaze, bringing the death toll to 238, a local relief organisation spokesman told AFP.

Most of the dead, including around 60 children and 30 women, were buried in three mass graves on Saturday in Sange, where flames engulfed dozens of earth-and-straw homes.

The fireball also spread rapidly to a local cinema hall where a crowd had gathered to follow the World Cup football matches.

The UN mission in DR Congo, MONUSCO, said nearly 200 people were injured in the fire, some suffering severe burns, who had to be taken by helicopter to two hospitals in the regional capital Bukavu to the north and Uvira to the south.

Flags flew at half mast around the vast central African country ‘in memory of our brothers and sisters so brutally taken from us,' Kabila said, in an address on national television on Sunday.

The accident had left the people of Sange "very sad, very traumatised. Some of them are very stressed," local aid worker Emmanuel Umbwe told AFP on Sunday.

Dozens of people, many of them children, had crowded around the tanker coming from Tanzania, after it overturned on Friday, to scavenge its contents, officials and witnesses said.

The driver of the truck managed to escape, though injured, and told local people to get away because of the risk of an explosion, witnesses said.

"Petrol began to leak out but instead of fleeing people came to collect the fuel," said a regional government spokesman Vincent Kabanga.

Explosions caused by fuel leaks from tankers after accidents or pipelines that have been punctured by thieves often claim hundreds of lives in the region as locals rush to scoop up fuel.