Eleven individuals, together with kids and a child, had been lacking after a hippopotamus capsized their boat in southwestern Ivory Coast, a authorities official mentioned Saturday.
The West African nation’s minister for nationwide cohesion and solidarity, Myss Belmonde Dogo, mentioned on her Fb web page that the lacking included girls, little ladies and an toddler.
She mentioned the hippopotamus tipped the slim, canoe-like boat over on Friday, because it was motoring alongside the Sassandra River close to the city of Buyo.
Three individuals survived the incident and had been rescued, and “a search is ongoing within the hope of discovering the lacking victims,” she mentioned.
A 2022 research by Ivory Coast college researchers discovered that hippopotamuses had been the species most talked about in interactions with people that triggered deaths or damage within the nation.
There are an estimated 500 hippos in Ivory Coast, distributed among the many varied rivers in nation’s south, primarily the Sassandra and the Bandama water programs.
Boat accidents are pretty widespread within the nation, as handcrafted longboats are used to navigate between waterside communities, and are ceaselessly overloaded with passengers and items.
In April, a dozen kids and adolescents drowned when the boat they had been on capsized in a lagoon close to the principal metropolis of Abidjan.
Estimates of how many individuals are killed by hippos annually fluctuate, with decrease figures starting at round 500.
In June 2024, a lady from New Jersey was killed in an hippopotamus assault throughout a safari in Zambia. The girl’s husband later sued the U.S. firm that organized the journey.
In 2023, seven individuals had been killed, together with a 1-year-old little one, within the southern African nation of Malawi when a hippo charged right into a canoe and capsized it on a river.
In 2018, a Chinese language vacationer and an area fisherman had been killed in hippo assaults on the identical day in Kenya.
Hippos are the world’s second-largest land mammals after elephants, measuring about 11 toes lengthy and about 5 toes tall, in accordance with Worldwide Fund for Animal Welfare. The common male hippo weighs about 7,000 kilos.
