Search teams brought back the first dead yesterday from a capsized ferry with hundreds of victims believed trapped aboard, and rushed to retrieve the rest before the vessel sank into the Atlantic Ocean.
More than 760 passengers and crew are believed to have perished when the crowded MS Joola, a state-run Senegalese ferry, heaved to its side shortly before midnight Thursday in a fierce gale. Only 32 people are known to have escaped, clinging to the vessel for two hours before fishing boats rescued them.
"It was horrible, because we were hearing people screaming from underneath," said one survivor, Senegalese Moussa Ndong, speaking from his hospital ward.
"The boat went down so fast. It was so unbelievable -- in just three minutes, the boat went down," he said.
Search boats returned to the port in Senegal's capital, Dakar, with 37 bodies. Three boats left port after sunrise to join the retrieval effort off the former English colony of Gambia, a thin strip of a nation that divides north and south Senegal.
The majority of the first 37 brought back to port were believed Senegalese, with two Europeans -- their country of origin not known -- among them, military police commandant Matar Kane said Saturday at Dakar's main naval base.
Grim-faced crowds waited by the hundreds outside the base's closed gates Saturday. As the sun rose, glare and heat beat down on them as they waited for news of their loved ones.
"Tell us whether she's alive," one sobbing woman -- seeking news of her daughter -- shouted Friday, when frantic and increasingly angry crowds sought an accounting of the names of the dead. "Can we please know whether she's alive?"
Families also demanded an accounting of the cause. Media reports said the Joola, carrying 796, was designed to bear fewer than 600.
The ferry had recently returned into service after long repair, and some witnesses claimed it already had been listing heavily on one side when it headed out Thursday from the southern Senegalese region of Casamance, bound for Dakar.
Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade, cutting short a trip to Paris at news of the disaster, pledged an investigation.
Many of those aboard were traders, carrying dried fish, mangos, and other items from Casamance for sale in the capital.
Ferries are the main way of transportation between north and south Senegal, in part because travel by road is slowed by border checks passing through Gambia.
Sporadic attacks by separatists seeking independence for Casa-mance also make many view the roads as unsafe.
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