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A wild hippopotamus capsized a boat containing 14 people including children and a baby in the Ivory Coast, leaving 11 missing, according to authorities.
The boat was travelling on the Sassandra River in the southwestern town of Buyo on Friday when the hippo overturned it, the country’s minister of cohesion and solidarity, Myss Belmonde Dogo said in a statement on Facebook.
“It is with deep sorrow that we learned that 11 people, including women, girls and an infant, have gone missing following a boat capsized caused by a hippo,” she wrote.
It is unclear exactly how old the passengers are, but Ms Dogo said the missing include “women, girls and an infant”.
Search and rescue operations are underway to find the missing, with only three people confirmed to have survived the freak accident.
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“The scene unfolded early yesterday morning on the Sassandra River in Buyo,” she said on Saturday. “Of the 14 occupants on the boat, at the moment 03 survivors. Search continues in hopes of finding missing victims.
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“Distressed by this tragedy that upsets us all, the Gouvernement de Co？te d'Ivoire joins the pain of the parents and relatives of the deceased and expresses its solidarity to the survivors.”
In 2022, Ivory Coast university researchers found that hippos are the most common cause of animal attacks that cause deaths or injuries in the country.
Lower estimates of how many people are killed by hippos each year worldwide start at around 500, according to CBS News.
Boat accidents are also relatively common in the Ivory Coast, where handcrafted longboats, often overloaded with passengers and goods, are used to travel between waterside communities. In April, 12 children and adolescents drowned after their boat capsized near the major city of Abidjan.
In 2023, a one-year-old child was among seven killed in the southern African country of Malawi, in another incident where a hippo capsized a canoe on a river.