Freetown - 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 UN 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.