Eleven people, including children and a baby, were missing after a hippopotamus capsized their boat in southwestern Ivory Coast, a government official said Saturday.<\/p>\n
The West African nation’s minister for national cohesion and solidarity, Myss Belmonde Dogo, said on her Facebook page<\/a> that the missing included women, little girls and an infant.<\/p>\n She said the hippopotamus tipped the narrow, canoe-like boat over on Friday, as it was motoring along the Sassandra River near the town of Buyo.<\/p>\n Three people survived the incident and were rescued, and “a search is ongoing in the hope of finding the missing victims,” she said.<\/p>\n A 2022 study by Ivory Coast university researchers found that hippopotamuses were the species most mentioned in interactions with humans that caused deaths or injury in the country.<\/p>\n There are an estimated 500 hippos in Ivory Coast, distributed among the various rivers in country’s south, mainly the Sassandra and the Bandama water courses.<\/p>\n Boat accidents are fairly common in the country, as handcrafted longboats are used to navigate between waterside communities, and are frequently overloaded with passengers and goods.<\/p>\n In April, a dozen children and adolescents drowned when the boat they were on capsized in a lagoon near the principal city of Abidjan.<\/p>\n Estimates of how many people are killed by hippos each year vary, with lower figures beginning at around 500.<\/p>\n In June 2024, a woman from New Jersey was killed in an hippopotamus attack during a safari in Zambia. The woman’s husband later sued<\/a> the U.S. company that arranged the trip.<\/p>\n In 2023, seven people were killed, including a 1-year-old child<\/a>, in the southern African nation of Malawi when a hippo charged into a canoe and capsized it on a river. <\/p>\n In 2018, a Chinese tourist and a local fisherman were\u00a0killed in hippo attacks<\/a>\u00a0on the same day in Kenya.<\/p>\n