At least 229 people have died in mudslides after heavy rain in south-western Ethiopia, in the deadliest such disaster recorded in the Horn of Africa country.
Officials in Kencho Shacha Gozdi district on Tuesday warned that the death toll could rise further as local people used shovels and their bare hands to search for survivors.
Most of the victims were rescue workers buried in a mudslide on Monday morning as they searched the steep terrain for survivors of another mudslide the previous day.
Many people remained unaccounted for, said Markos Melese, director of the disaster response agency in Gofa Zone.
“There are children who are hugging corpses, having lost their entire family, including mother, father, brother and sister, due to the accident,” he told the Associated Press.
Images posted on Facebook by the Gofa Zone authority show crowds standing on red soil and some using their bare hands to dig through it in rescue efforts.
Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, said: “Our hearts and prayers are with the families [of the victims].”
“We stand in strong solidarity with the people and Government of #Ethiopia as rescue efforts continue to find the missing and assist the displaced,” he wrote on X.
Gofa Zone is a mountainous area in the South Ethiopia regional state. Seasonal rains between April and May in the state caused flooding, damaged infrastructure and displaced more than a thousand people, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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In 2016, 41 people were killed in a mudslide after torrential rain in Wolaita, another area in southern Ethiopia.
Ethiopia and other eastern African countries have become increasingly vulnerable to the climate crisis, with the region experiencing changing onsets and durations of dry and wet seasons. Last November, unusually heavy rainfall in southern and eastern Ethiopia killed dozens of people and displaced hundreds of thousands.