[1] When Brigadier António de Spínola came to Guinea in 1968 as Governor and Commander in Chief, he decided to evacuate the Portuguese troops in the east of the country, which was thinly populated and of no strategic value.

[4] Moving the troops, vehicles and equipment over 22 kilometres (14 mi) to Chéché, on the south bank of the Corubal River, was a difficult operation but was completed successfully.

When the raft reached the other bank the extent of the disaster was realised:[2] 47 Portuguese soldiers[5] and five Guinean militia from the Madina do Boé garrison had died.

[4] About two weeks later, an operation was launched using marines and navy divers to try to recover the bodies, which were already in an advanced state of decomposition.

[2] In February 2010 a team of researchers from the Faculty of Science and Technology in the University of Coimbra exhumed and tried to identify the bodies of between fifteen and seventeen of the soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave 300 metres (980 ft) from the river.