The death toll from a landslide at a vast garbage dump in the Ugandan capital Kampala has risen to 18, police said on Sunday, amid claims the site was a disaster waiting to happen.

Local media said homes, people and livestock were engulfed in mountains of waste at the landfill in the northern Kampala district of Kiteezi on Saturday after a collapse caused by heavy downpours.

President Yoweri Museveni said he had directed the army’s special forces to help in the search and rescue operation and demanded to know who allowed people to live near such a “potentially hazardous and dangerous heap”.

Kampala’s metropolitan police spokesman Patrick Onyango told reporters at the scene that 14 bodies had been recovered on Saturday, and another four on Sunday.

He gave no breakdown, but on Saturday the Kampala Capital City Authority, which operates the landfill, had given a death toll of eight including two children.

Earlier, Onyango told AFP that an estimated 1,000 people were displaced and that the police were working with other government agencies and community leaders to see how to help those affected.

Kampala mayor Erias Lukwago told AFP that “many, many more could be still buried in the heap as the rescue operation is ongoing”.

He described it as a “national disaster”, accusing corrupt officials who have been syphoning off money that should have been used to maintain the landfill.

– ‘Danger zone’ –

Museveni said in a statement posted on X that he had ordered payments to the victims’ families of five million Ugandan shillings ($1,300) for each fatality and one million shillings ($270) for each injured person.

He also called for an investigation into how people were allowed to live so close to the site and ordered the removal of all those living in the “danger zone”.

Excavators were still churning through huge mounds of rubbish on Sunday as crowds of local residents looked on, some wailing in despair.

Lukwago had on Saturday raised concerns about the safety of the 36-acre (14-hectare) Kiteezi landfill which was established in 1996 and takes in almost all garbage collected across Kampala.

“This is a disaster and was bound to happen as the landfill was full to capacity,” he told AFP, adding that it received about 1,500 tonnes of waste a day.

In January, Lukwago had warned that people working and living near the site were at risk of numerous health hazards due to overflowing waste.

Several areas in Uganda and other parts of East Africa have been battered by heavy rains recently, including Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent.

Devastating mudslides in a remote mountainous area in southern Ethiopia last month killed around 250 people.

In February 2010, mudslides in the Mount Elgon region of eastern Uganda killed more than 350 people. (AFP)

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