Soldiers and volunteers equipped with shovels and pickaxes dug through the perilous site of a mudslide in Sierra Leone on Thursday in search of hundreds of bodies that may still be buried days after the incident.
Soldiers and volunteers equipped with shovels and pickaxes dug through the perilous site of a mudslide in Sierra Leone on Thursday in search of hundreds of bodies that may still be buried days after the incident.
Approximately 600 people are missing after a torrent of mud on Monday swept away homes on the edge of the capital, Freetown, the Red Cross said, in one of Africa's worst flood disasters in living memory. Around 400 bodies have been found.
Aid agencies warned that corpses trapped in the mud are likely to contaminate water sources and cause outbreaks of disease, but continuous rain has made the search difficult and dangerous.
"The topography of this area is not easily accessible, but as military we continue to make headway," said colonel Abu Bakarr Bah, who is leading a search team near the town of Regent, where part of a mountainside collapsed.
Local construction companies have loaned excavators but many volunteers are digging with household tools and whatever else they can find, said Red Cross spokesman Abu Bakarr Tarawallie.
"We fear there are no more survivors," he said. "All yesterday no one living was found."
The government is preparing to bury 300 bodies on Thursday, said government spokesman Cornelius Deveaux. A mass burial of 150 bodies was held earlier this week, said the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Families were summoned to the central morgue on Wednesday to identify relatives, but many were unable to and officials were forced to proceed with burial because the corpses were decomposing in the heat.
The burial will be held at a cemetery outside Freetown that was used during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak, which killed 4,000 people in the former British colony.
The scale of the disaster was in part due to poor government housing policies that left hundreds living in informal settlements in flood-prone areas, London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement.
"While flooding is a natural disaster, the scale of the human tragedy in Freetown is, sadly, very much man-made," said Makmid Kamara, Amnesty's deputy director of global issues.
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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