• At least 61 people have died in the sinking of a ferry in Bangladesh.
• More passengers are still unaccounted for two days after the catastrophe.
• The boat may have been carrying roughly three times its capacity when it capsized.

At least 61 people have died in the sinking of a ferry in Bangladesh, according to local authorities, and more passengers are still unaccounted for two days after the catastrophe.

According to preliminary investigations, the boat may have been carrying roughly three times its capacity when the tragedy occurred on Sunday, according to Jahurul Islam, the Panchagarh district’s top administrator.

He added that so far, the bodies of 28 women and 18 children have been found, and that divers are still looking for additional victims because some are still missing.

A tiny boat filled with Hindu pilgrims headed to a well-known shrine capsized in the Karatoya River as witnesses gasped from the beach close to Boda town in Panchagarh.

While some of the passengers could swim ashore or were saved, according to the police, about 10 were still missing. More than 80 persons, according to passengers, were aboard.

Sujay Kumar Roy, the head of the Boda police department, reported that villagers, firefighters, naval divers, and other rescuers were scouring miles downriver on the river.

As rescuers looked for bodies, observers and missing persons’ family members gathered along the riverbed, according to witnesses.

Deepak Chandra Roy cried as he searched for his mother and stated, “I just want to see the face of my mother.”

One distressed family member, Bikash Chandra, said, “Three women of my family were missing since the boat capsized.” “We discovered one early in the day, around 10 a.m., who had been rescued earlier. Yet, I was unable to locate the other two.

The number of fatalities was the most for a maritime accident in the nation since 2015, when at least 78 people perished when a cargo ship and an overcrowded ferry crashed in a river west of the nation’s capital, Dhaka.

In Bangladesh, a low-lying nation with numerous inland waterways and insufficient safety standards, dozens of people die in boat accidents yearly.

After an overloaded speedboat collided with a bulk cargo carrying sand and sunk on the Padma River in May, at least 26 persons perished.

In southern Bangladesh, a crowded three-story ferry caught fire in December of last year, killing about 40 people.

After colliding with another vessel, a ferry capsized in Dhaka in June 2020, killing at least 32 persons. In contrast, a cargo ship and an overcrowded ship crashed in a river west of the city in 2015, killing at least 78 people.

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