At least 32 people have died and several dozen are missing after a boat carrying Hindu pilgrims sank in a river in northern Bangladesh, police said on Monday. The boat was over capacity.
Seven more bodies were found by rescuers traveling down the Karotoa River near the northern town of Boda where the boat tipped and sank on Sunday, district police chief Sirajul Huda said.
The boat was carrying about 90 people, “three times its capacity”, according to Mr. Huda.
“Sixty people are still missing,” he told AFP.
“There were heavy rains in the morning and that is why (…) the pilgrims piled into the boat to arrive quickly at the temple”, detailed Mr. Huda.
‘The boatman asked some people to disembark in order to lighten the load. But no one listened.
According to local media, at least ten people were rescued and hospitalized.
Footage taken with mobile phones, relayed by the television channel Channel 24, shows the overloaded boat suddenly flipping over, throwing the passengers into the muddy waters of the river.
Long list of disasters
Dozens of people on the banks about 20 meters away started screaming and screaming when they saw the scene. The weather was calm at the time of the tragedy.
Thousands of Hindus from Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country, visit the Bodeshwari temple every year. Sunday marked the start of Durga Puja, the main Hindu festival in Bangladesh – as in eastern India – which draws large crowds to temples.
This accident extends a long list of comparable disasters in this country of 170 million inhabitants, poor and crossed by many rivers.
The tragedies associated with shipwrecks are mainly blamed on lack of maintenance, lax safety standards and overcrowding on board.
Last December more than 40 people died when a crowded ferry caught fire in the south of the country.
The flames broke out early in the morning when most passengers were sleeping near Jhakakathi, a rural town some 250 kilometers south of the capital Dhaka.
In June 2021 a ferry sank in Dhaka after colliding with another ship, killing at least 32 people.
At least 78 people died in February 2015 when an overcrowded boat collided with a freighter in a river west of the capital.
/ATS