This Day in History: On this day in 1998 an entire Congolese soccer team of 11 players were fatally struck by lightning while playing. Local investigators blamed the lightning bolt on witchcraft because none of the players on the opposing team from nearby Basangana village were injured. The fear of witchcraft induced lightning is very deep in parts of Africa. People believe that a witch can deploy lightning to kill people or livestock of selected targets.
While the witchcraft angle is interesting, there have been many mass deaths and injuries by lightning in the past...witch-induced or not. In 1769 lightning struck gunpowder kept in a church in Brescia, Italy...killing 3000 people.
On June 30, 1980, a lightning incident killed 11 students in Biego primary school in Kenya.
On November 2 1994 a lightning strike led to the explosion of fuel tanks in Dronka, Egypt, killing 469 people.
Sixty-eight dairy cows were killed by lightning in New South Wales, Australia on Halloween day in 2005.
Thirty people were killed by lightning in Ushari Dara, Pakistan in 2007.
A lightning strike on June 8 2011 sent 77 Air Force cadets to the hospital when it struck in the middle of a training camp at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.
323 reindeer were killed by lightning in Norway in 2016. Norwegian Environment Agency spokesman Kjartan Knutsen said it had never heard of such a death toll before. He said he did not know if multiple strikes occurred, but that they all died in "one moment".
A lightning strike in 2018 killed at least 16 people and injured dozens more at a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Rwanda.
In April 2021, at least 76 people across India were killed by lightning strike on a single weekend.
On August 04 2021, 17 people were killed by a single lightning strike in Shibganj Upazila of Chapainawabganj district in Bangladesh; 16 people died on the spot and the other one died by heart attack while seeing the others.
The most-stricken human in the world is Roy Sullivan, who holds the Guinness World Record for surviving seven different lightning strikes. Sullivan was a United States park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.
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