Harare — At least 16 people have died and close to 30 injured when a four-storey building collapsed onto a smaller one in Cameroon’s largest city, Douala.
According to AFP, medical officials said that a three-year-old girl was one of the victims, and three other children were still in intensive care.
Emergency personnel did not respond until the early hours of the morning, according to locals who stated that the event happened around midnight.
“The casualty figures may be higher”, Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, governor of Cameroon’s Littoral region, is reported to have said.
In Douala in 2016, five people died in similar circumstances, with officials blaming poor state of repairs and potential breaches of construction standards. Local officials identified 500 buildings at risk of collapsing in June of that year.