Equateur counts 22 dead on the Congo River as AP puts the same collision at 30

Two news agencies left Monday with different counts of one collision on the Congo River in Equateur. Reuters, quoting provincial interior minister Crispin Mputu, said 22 bodies had been recovered and buried, 59 people had been rescued, and a passenger boat carrying 163 people was still on the bottom at a depth of 12 metres near Ngombe, in Lukolela territory. The Associated Press, also quoting Mputu, said at least 30 people had been killed and dozens were missing. Al Jazeera, citing the state agency Agence Congolaise Presse and the same minister, named the boats.

The time does not match either. Reuters placed the crash at about 2 a.m. local time on Saturday, which is 0100 GMT. AP placed it on Sunday evening. Both put it near Ngombe-Lukolela, in western Equateur. Until the province publishes one clock and one list, families in Kinshasa and upriver are working from whichever number reached them first.

What each account says the boats were doing

Mputu told Reuters that one vessel was a commercial boat on the Kinshasa-Mbandaka run and the other a passenger riverboat travelling from Mongala province toward Kinshasa. The impact sank the passenger boat. A security source, not a published manifest, gave Reuters the figure of 163 people on board. Mputu said other victims might have been buried away from the official count, which is one plain way a 22 and a 30 can both be in circulation on the same afternoon.

He told AP a different pair of directions. One boat was coming from Ubangi, in the northwest, toward the capital. The other was going from Kinshasa toward Lukolela, close to the crash site. A member of the security forces who said he watched from the bank, and who spoke to AP without permission to be named, said the Ubangi boat was overloaded with goods and hit the Kinshasa boat. He said almost all the passengers were trapped underwater and that the boat itself sank.

Al Jazeera's account, drawn from Agence Congolaise Presse, is the only one that names hulls. Mputu told the state agency that a metal vessel called Dieu se cache was coming from Kinshasa and a wooden vessel called HB Super Victoire was coming from Businga. Businga sits in Nord-Ubangi, which lines up with the Ubangi origin in the AP account and sits awkwardly against the Mongala origin in the Reuters account. Neither Reuters nor AP used the boat names.

Why the number can move after the burials

Mputu told both Reuters and AP that the people already pulled from the water had been buried. A burial on the bank takes a body out of any later search. He also told Reuters that recovery was still going on Monday evening and that the sunken vessel remained at 12 metres. A wooden passenger boat at that depth does not come up with a ticket list attached. The 59 rescued are a floor, not a full roll. The 163 is a security source's number. The gap between 22 confirmed burials and 30 dead, with dozens still described as missing, is the range the province has not closed.

Night running is the part Mputu was willing to explain. He told AP the cause was not yet clear, and that boats moving after dark have produced many earlier accidents on this river. Reuters added the standing conditions: in much of western Congo the river is the road and the market, and the boats are often overcrowded and poorly kept. The anonymous officer's account of an overloaded goods boat is the only description so far of how the hulls met.

Equateur is the wrong province in which to treat an early toll as final. Towns sit on the water. Kinshasa to Mbandaka is a trunk route. Lukolela, Ngombe, Mongala and the Ubangi approaches all feed it. A collision at 2 a.m. Saturday and a collision on Sunday evening are not the same event. If both descriptions are of one crash, one of the two times is wrong, and the passenger origin is wrong in at least one telling. Dieu se cache and HB Super Victoire may be the hulls. They may also be names that have not yet been checked against a port book.

What is still open

The useful reading on Monday night is narrow. Two boats met near Ngombe. One sank. At least 22 people are confirmed dead and buried. Fifty-nine were taken off the water. A security source put 163 people on the passenger boat. The wreck is 12 metres down, and the search had not finished. AP's 30 and the state agency's boat names are in the record, and they have not been reconciled with the Reuters figures.

The open question is which clock and which list the province will stand on once the hull is raised. A search at 12 metres can still change both the dead and the missing. It cannot change the fact that the bodies already buried will not be in that later count.