More than 100 dead in Lake Victoria ferry capsizing

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00:43

More than 100 people died after a passenger ferry capsized in Lake Victoria, AFP reported citing Tanzania state media.

Rescuers resumed searching for missing passengers at the crack of dawn on Friday as hundreds more are still unaccounted for, a day after a ferry sank in the lake.

Jonathan Shana, the regional police commander for Mwanza, said more rescuers had joined the operation when it resumed at daylight on Friday but did not give exact numbers.

President John Magufuli was "deeply saddened" by the disaster and called on Tanzanians to "stay calm during these difficult times," according to spokesman Gerson Msigwa.

The country's opposition, however, accused the government of "negligence."

Initial estimates showed that the MV Nyerere was carrying more than 300 people on board. It went down just a few meters from the dock in the Ukerewe district, according to national ferry services operator TEMESA.

However, it is hard to establish the precise number of passengers on board since the person dispensing tickets also drowned and the machine recording the data lost.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear, but overloading is often to blame in incidents like this.

TEMESA spokeswoman Theresia Mwami said the operator had carried out had overhauled two engines on the ferry in the past few months.

In 1996, at least 500 people died in a ferry disaster in the same region of Lake Victoria.

In 2012, at least 145 people died in a ferry disaster in Tanzania's semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, on a vessel that was overcrowded.

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Source(s): AFP ,Reuters