At least 220 people have been killed after a lorry carrying fuel overturned on a highway and leaked oil that triggered an explosion in a village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, officials say.

As many residents of Sange crowded around the overturned vehicle on Friday, fire rapidly engulfed homes and cinemas packed with people watching a World Cup football match.

Among the dead were 61 children and 36 women, the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in South-Kivu province said.

Officials said the explosion injured 196 people in addition to inflicting deaths and material damage.

Among the dead were villagers who had surrounded the lorry to siphon off fuel from the wreckage, apparently unaware of the danger, according to officials of the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DRC, known as Monusco.

As oil began leaking from the damaged tanker, Pakistani peacekeepers from a nearby Monusco base "came and told people to get away from the area, but
people refused to leave", Bedide Mwasha, a 45-year-old resident, said.

"Men, women and children, even [government] soldiers were stealing petrol."

UN helps evacuation

UN peacekeepers later helped evacuate more than 200 wounded people from the scene by helicopter and ambulance.

Red Cross teams, for their part, carried charred bodies from the scene in body bags and buried them on Saturday in two mass graves a few kilometres away.
The fuel tanker overturned as it was trying to pass a minibus near Sange, Mana Lungwe, a manager of the Congolese oil company that owned the vehicle, said.

Sange is located about 20-30km north of Uvira, a town on the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika, near the border with Burundi.

The tanker began gushing oil and, an hour later, burst into flames, Lungwe said.

The explosion claimed the lives of 208 people immediately, while 11 others died from burn wounds after they were taken to nearby medical facilities, James Reynolds, the deputy head of the ICRC in DRC, said.

He said alongside local volunteers of the organisation, the ICRC has dispatched medical supplies and body bags to collect the dead and help the wounded.

"We're doing our best to ensure that the wounded are treated as well as possible,'' he said.

Burnt to ashes

Later on Saturday, Al Jazeera's Malcolm Webb, reporting from Sange, said: "It is a large area of devastation. A [cinema] was crammed with people watching a World Cup match. The whole thing is now completely destroyed.
"Behind it, another cinema and a couple of houses have been completely burnt to ashes."

"I am now two kilometres up the road from the scene where the UN and local Red Cross brought a lot of the bodies and are now burying them in mass graves.

"It was a big fuel tank with a very large amount of fuel. People were apparently trying to get some of the fuel.

"Fuel is a valuable commodity here.
 
"This is one of the poorest parts [of the DRC], so people scrambled to try and get some. And then, 20 minutes or so after the lorry tipped over, something triggered the explosion."

Madnodge Mounoubai, a Monusco spokesperson, told Al Jazeera that about 35 people were air-lifted to Bukavu, the provincial capital, for treatment.

Survivors "in the village need water, food and maybe psychological assistance", he said.

"Bukavu is about 100 kilometres from Sange while Uvira is about 33 kilometres.
 
"But in either place we don't have any special hospital to treat the injured.
 
"We are trying to get the best possible medical care that we can, but unfortunately there is no special unit for burned people."

Monusco initially said that five peacekeepers were killed in the blaze, but later said there were no deaths.

PHOTO CAPTION

The map of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Al-jazeera