Capital city mourns

Press, 1 September 1986, Page 10

Capital city mourns

NZPA-Reuter Yaounde, Cameroon

Yaounde’s normally busy streets were all but deserted yesterday as it mourned more than 1700 victims of a toxic gas disaster in Cameroon’s north-west. State radio broadcast funeral music interspersed with news bulletins as the capital’s population respected the national day of mourning declared by the President, Mr Paul Biya. Flags flew at half-mast as a mark of respect for the dead, now put by the United Nations at 1746, in

the worst incident of its type. Protestant and Catholic churches, as well as Islamic mosques, held services in memory of the dead.

A United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) telex said that 1700 of those killed had been buried and 10,000 people moved from seven villages around the now polluted volcanic Lake Nyos, from which the gas escaped on August 21.

International aid continued to flood in to Cameroon although moving it to the stricken villages in the isolated north-west of

the country during the rainy season was a problem, officials said. A West German military plane was due to land today at Cameroon’s international airport in the port city of Douala carrying 1000 blankets, 1.5 tonnes of medicines and bandages and 0.6 tonnes of protein-rich cakes.

Other human and material aid from European Economic Community States, the United States, Japan, Israel and Switzerland has arrived in the stricken area, which is close to the frontier with Nigeria.