Landslide at Guinea landfill kills 30, government says

Thirty people died in Guinea's capital Conakry on Sunday when a mound of rubbish in a landfill collapsed before dawn onto neighboring homes following heavy rains, the government said.

Six others were seriously injured in the 2 am (0200 GMT) incident in the Bbessia district's Dar-es-salam neighborhood on the capital's outskirts, a government statement said.

"Significant material and human resources have been deployed to search for any people who may still be buried, to rescue the victims and to recover the bodies," the government added.

Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah visited the site of the deadly accident, where excavators were seen to take part in a search-and-rescue operation through the collapsed landfill under the gaze of a crowd of onlookers.

Measures have been taken "to ensure medical care for the wounded" and "assistance for those affected by this tragedy," the government statement said.

Before the official toll's announcement, neighborhood leader Lancine Sylla had said he feared that many had died in the collapse.

"We have pulled out 18 bodies that were taken to the morgue," he told AFP.

One of Guinea's main opposition figures, former prime minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who is in exile abroad, called the accident "a tragedy that plunges us into dismay." "This tragedy is all the more worrying because the closure of the dump had been announced for this Sunday, August 23," he said on Facebook.

"It is now up to the competent authorities to establish, with full transparency, the circumstances that led to this disaster and to draw all the necessary conclusions," he added in the statement posted before the release of the death toll.

In recent days, the government had ordered the eviction of people around the site because of fears of a collapse.