EAST AFRICA: Rwanda evacuates nationals injured in Ugandan bus tragedy

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

KAMPALA, 23 Sep 2003 (IRIN) - The Rwandan government has evacuated 22 injured Rwandan nationals, mostly students, from Kabale referral hospital in southwestern Uganda following a bus tragedy in which at least 47 people were killed and 33 critically injured.

"Their health team moved in very late last evening with ambulances to remove the Rwandans, as the hospital was way over capacity with the crash. Another seven Ugandans are still lying in hospital in critical condition. We don’t know where their relatives are," Ugandan police spokesman Asmani Mugenyi told IRIN.

The tragedy occurred on Monday in Uganda’s Kabale district, about 4km from the border with Rwanda. An overloaded passenger bus coming from Bujumbura collided with a truck carrying food aid for the World Food Programme (WFP). The truck driver and his assistant were killed instantly, Mugenyi said.

The truck originated in Kampala and was heading towards the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, to provide urgently needed food for civilians displaced by continued fighting in the country. The bus was travelling from Bujumbura to the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Regional police sources said documents recovered from the dead confirmed that most of them were Rwandan and Burundian students, who were returning to Uganda to start term. "The numbers killed indicate that the bus was severely overloaded – way in excess of the 60 passengers it is built to carry," Mugenyi told IRIN.

He said that 20 of the dead still had to be identified by relatives, adding that hundreds of body parts were being recovered from the crash site.

"The logistics make it impossible for us to bring in sophisticated equipment to identify them," Mugenyi said, "so we are encouraging possible relatives of the dead, hard as this may be, to come and see if there are any distinguishing marks on the body parts that could help us identify them".

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