Bangladesh rescue teams on Monday recovered 20 bodies from the ship that sank in a river near Dhaka on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths in this river accident to 25.
“Until now, 25 people have died in the accident. During the night we recovered five bodies and today we remove another 20. There may be more bodies inside the ship,” Abdullah Arefin, the chief of the local fire service that directs the operation, told Efe.
THE BOAT CARRIED 50 PASSENGERS
The accident of the boat, in which about 50 passengers were traveling, occurred in the middle of Sunday afternoon on the Shitalakkhya river, at the height of the Narayanganj district, according to the head of the local administration Mostain Billah, who clarified that a twenty occupants managed to swim to shore.
According to the initial investigation, the ship was struck by a smaller vessel before sinking, it added.
One of the survivors, quoted by the local newspaper Prothom Alo, said that the ship was crowded, as many people were heading to their villages after the decision of the Bangladeshi government to impose a national lockdown of one week, starting today Monday, to contain the rapid advance of the coronavirus.
Maritime accidents such as sinking and ship collisions are prevalent in the country, where hundreds of waterways, including the Ganges Delta rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Padma and Meghna, are commonly used for transportation.
At least 25 people died on Monday in the wreck of a passenger boat with 50 people on board in the Buriganga River, near Dhaka, in central Bangladesh.
In most cases, these incidents can be attributed to overloading and poor condition of the vessels.
However, they have been considerably reduced over the years due to improvements in the weather forecast and the implementation of new security measures.
According to the Bangladesh Passenger Welfare Association, a total of 313 people died and 371 remain missing in 183 accidents on the country’s waterways in 2020.
In one of the latest accidents with the most casualties, which occurred last September, at least ten people were killed after two boats collided in a river in the Netrakona district of northeastern Bangladesh, where a month earlier another 17 people died after capsize the boat in which they were traveling.
In June, another 30 people died after a boat carrying about 50 passengers capsized in the Buriganga River, one of the country’s main navigable rivers that connects Dhaka with other parts of Bangladesh.