KAMPALA (Reuters) – The bodies of two three-year-old boys were among those pulled from mud in eastern Uganda, swelling to 28 the death toll from a landslide last week that buried several villages, police said, with dozens still unaccounted for.
More than 100 people had been feared missing, with 17 dead after Wednesday’s landslide on the slopes of Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano on the border with Kenya, about 300 km (190 miles) east of the capital, Kampala.
More bodies have been retrieved since, including the two boys, police said in a statement on X late on Monday, but gave no further details.
Since October, unusually heavy rains have triggered widespread flooding and landslides in some areas of Uganda, in weather the Uganda Red Cross has blamed on climate change.
The area around the site of last week’s tragedy has experienced several deadly landslides, with one in 2010 killing at least 80.
Authorities’ past efforts to persuade residents of the areas most prone to such disasters to shift to safer ground have met little success as most are poor and lack the means to do so.
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Hereward Holland and Clarence Fernandez)
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