Eleven people, including children and a baby, were missing after a hippopotamus capsized their boat in southwestern Ivory Coast, a government official said Saturday.

The West African nation's minister for national cohesion and solidarity, Myss Belmonde Dogo, said on her Facebook page that the missing included women, little girls and an infant.

She said the hippopotamus tipped the narrow, canoe-like boat over on Friday, as it was motoring along the Sassandra River near the town of Buyo.

Three people survived the incident and were rescued, and "a search is ongoing in the hope of finding the missing victims," she said.

A 2022 study by Ivory Coast university researchers found that hippopotamuses were the species most mentioned in interactions with humans that caused deaths or injury in the country.

There are an estimated 500 hippos in Ivory Coast, distributed among the various rivers in country's south, mainly the Sassandra and the Bandama water courses.

Boat accidents are fairly common in the country, as handcrafted longboats are used to navigate between waterside communities, and are frequently overloaded with passengers and goods.

In April, a dozen children and adolescents drowned when the boat they were on capsized in a lagoon near the principal city of Abidjan.

Estimates of how many people are killed by hippos each year vary, with lower figures beginning at around 500.

In June 2024, a woman from New Jersey was killed in an hippopotamus attack during a safari in Zambia. The woman's husband later sued the U.S. company that arranged the trip.

In 2023, seven people were killed, including a 1-year-old child, in the southern African nation of Malawi when a hippo charged into a canoe and capsized it on a river.

In 2018, a Chinese tourist and a local fisherman were killed in hippo attacks on the same day in Kenya.

Hippos are the world's second-largest land mammals after elephants, measuring about 11 feet long and about 5 feet tall, according to International Fund for Animal Welfare. The average male hippo weighs about 7,000 pounds.

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