- Officials rescue six people, say efforts ongoing to locate those still missing
At least 21 people were killed, while others remain missing, after a passenger ferry carrying more than 27 people capsized in the Nile River State in northern Sudan.
Civil Defence officials in the war-ravaged nation said on Thursday that the victims include women, children, and the elderly people, adding that the wooden boat sank as it was sailing between the Taiba Al-Khawad and Deim Al-Qarray areas in the Shendi locality of River Nile State.
A statement mourning the deaths by the Sudanese Sovereignty Council said the 21 bodies were recovered after the incident, which occurred on Wednesday, while search efforts were continuing to recover about a dozen people believed missing.
Police Major General Qurashi Hussein, Sudan’s Assistant Director General of Civil Defence, told reporters on Thursday that six or seven people had been rescued,
Hussein explained that teams had been sent from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, to assist with the operation, with all Civil Defence teams in River Nile State mobilised to search for the missing.
“Our teams are still searching for bodies of those who drowned in the Nile,” he said.
Also, the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), an association of Sudanese medical professionals, said in a post on X that the tragedy highlighted “the fragility of river transport” in the country and “the absence of basic safety requirements”.
According to the SDN, the slow response from local authorities and civil defense teams during the initial hours following the sinking “exacerbated the scale of the disaster”,
The group, while urging authorities “to take urgent action to dispatch specialized rescue teams and search and recovery equipment” also demanded that authorities respond with “immediate measures to ensure the safety of river transport and prevent the recurrence of such disasters that claim the lives of the innocent”.
Reports indicated that Wednesday’s incident is not the first tragedy on the river in the northern Sudanese state.
In 2018, at least 23 people, most of them children, drowned when their boat sank in the Nile while they were being taken to school.
