Despair and anger in Conakry after deadly landfill collapse

Rescuers operating giant excavators searched for victims of a deadly landfill collapse in Guinea on Monday in torrential rain, after residents said they had warned of the precarious situation that has now wiped out almost entire families.

Abou Hamza, an outraged resident of Conakry's Dar es Salam neighbourhood where the collapse killed 31 people in the early hours of Sunday, said that locals had tried to alert Guinea's authorities about the danger.

The garbage dump collapse in the capital suburb followed heavy rain, injuring more than 20 people and wiping away several homes.

Resident Cire Kallo told AFP he had lost his five children and that "my life stopped today, I no longer need life".

Abdoul Soumah, a young man, said his mother, his brothers and his sister were killed.

Instant death, screaming, the wailing of those realising their loved ones had died: the residents of Dar es Salam were jolted into the sudden nightmare Sunday.

"We young people did everything to prevent this. We organised meetings and invited officials, but they didn't take the matter seriously," Hamza, a youth community leader, told AFP at the scene.

"The state failed to take steps to close the dump," Hamza said. "Yet they had promised us they would a year ago."

By Monday the site was completely cordoned off by security, and the grounds even muddier due to the pounding rain.

Dozens of people including children had desperately crowded at the top of the heaps alongside excavators on Sunday searching for survivors and the dead, while rescue teams travelled back and forth, carrying people on stretchers, escorted by distraught relatives.

Dozens of grieving women in a state of shock could be seen crying in anguish, comforting each other.

Alhassane Camara, a young neighbourhood resident, recounted the moment the landslide struck his home in the middle of the night, instantly killing his younger brother.

"I was sleeping with my two brothers... there were strange noises behind me. Then I saw things fall," he said.

Of his brothers "there were two little ones: one died inside and we managed to get the other one out", he said.

His mother, grandmother and sisters all got out as well: "It was God who helped us," Camara said.

Another resident, Aboubacar Camara, appeared exhausted but said he had managed to save his family.

"Around 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning we heard a slide, screams outside, everyone was screaming," he said.

Just as he stepped out of his home with his wife, a second slide occurred, sweeping away several young men from the neighbourhood who had gone to rescue victims of the first landslide, he said.

"Everyone who went there to help, they all ended up buried in it," he said.

Resident Player Macire's husband had gone to save people after the first collapse "and then, suddenly a second disaster buried the father of my children", she said.

More than 400 displaced people have been evacuated since Sunday evening and are being housed in a primary school set up to provide "shelter and emergency support" in the capital's Dixinn neighbourhood, a source at the ministry of territorial administration told AFP.

Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah visited the scene Sunday, assuring that measures were being taken "to ensure medical care for the injured" and "assistance for those affected by this tragedy".

In recent days, the government had announced operations to evacuate residents and secure the area surrounding the landfill due to risk of landslides.

The rainy season is particularly long and intense in the region.

Meanwhile, Cellou Dalein Diallo, a leading Guinean opposition figure and former prime minister currently living in exile, described the event as "a tragedy that plunges us into dismay".

Former president Alpha Conde wrote on Facebook that "losing a loved one is already an immense ordeal. Losing five at once is a pain that words struggle to express".