An overloaded ferry carrying up to 200 passengers sank yesterday on a river in central Bangladesh, police said.
Rescue teams have pulled about 100 people out of the water, authorities said. Two dead bodies have been found, but the rest remain unaccounted for.
The boat was about 30km south of the capital Dhaka when it sank in rough conditions.
“We have heard that the ferry was overloaded with passengers and the river was rough,” local police chief Tofazzal Hossain said.
The police chief of Madaripur, where the ferry began its journey, said it was carrying between 170 and 200 passengers, but one survivor, speaking on local television, said the ferry was overloaded with up to 350 passengers.
“There was no storm, but the weather was cloudy and the river was rough. The waves were huge,” the survivor said.
“Suddenly, the ferry was hit by a wave and flooded with water. I got out through a window and the ferry sank quickly. I was rescued by a local motor boat, other people were also rescued by boats,” he added.
Bangladeshi ferries do not maintain passenger logbooks and are often overloaded.
Ferry accidents are common in the impoverished country, with overcrowding and poor ship design and maintenance often to blame.
Emergency workers at the scene said thousands of onlookers had gathered on the banks of the swollen Padma River, in the district of Munshiganj, where the boat sank.
This month is the monsoon season in Bangladesh, when rivers run high, and the ship was completely submerged.
“Our divers are going to locate the sunken ferry and start the rescue operations,” Mohammad Dulal of the fire service said.
Bangladesh, one of Asia’s poorest nations, is criss-crossed by more than 230 rivers and boats are the main form of travel, especially in the southern and northeastern regions.
However, many of the vessels in use date back to before independence in 1971.
Officials have said more than 95 percent of Bangladesh’s hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized boats do not meet minimum safety regulations.
In May, a passenger ferry thought to be carrying between 150 and 200 people sank in central Bangladesh, killing dozens of people.
The death toll of the accident remains unknown.
Survivors blamed the ship’s captain for refusing to take shelter from a gathering storm.
About 150 people were killed in the same district in March 2012 after an overcrowded ferry carrying about 200 passengers sank when it was hit by an oil barge in the middle of the night.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS