Ferry disaster death toll could top 1,000
The death toll from Senegal’s ferry disaster could top 1,000 after President Abdoulaye Wade conceded today that there probably many more passengers on the overloaded boat than on the manifest.
Shipping agents said children under five would have gone unticketed – and thus apparently uncounted in the toll of dead.
“We know the people on the boat did not mention the babies, and the girls and boys,” President Wade told CNN. “So it might happen the definitive number is over 1,034.”
“There will be prosecutions, of course,” the president said. “Under our law, if a person by negligence provokes an accident or the death of a person, he has to be tried. And the people that will have any responsibility will be before the courts.”
Today 970 of 1,034 reported aboard the state-run MS Joola were confirmed dead or missing and presumed dead.
In Germany, the shipyard that built the ferry for Senegal in 1990 confirmed that the vessel had been designed for 536 passengers and 64 crew – nearly half the number Senegal says was aboard at the time of the disaster.
“It was conceived for this route” in Senegal, and was certified to go as far as 50 nautical miles out to sea, said George Hoeckels, a manager with the Neue Germersheimer Schiffswerft in the Rhine river town of Germersheim.
The MS Joola was in the Atlantic more than a dozen nautical miles off the former British colony of Gambia, a thin strip of land dividing north and south Senegal, when it tumbled into the waves in a fierce gale just before midnight last Thursday.
Only 64 people are known to have survived – all passengers and crew who escaped in the first minutes.
They clung to the capsized vessel or debris for four hours before the first fishing boats arrived to the rescue. The majority of the victims dead remained where they died, inside the ferry.
