Death toll in boat accident rises to 18

Death toll from a boat accident in Bangladesh has risen to 18, with rescuers pulling five more bodies from the vessel, police said on Thursday.

District Police Chief, Mr S.M. Akhteruzzaman, said that rescuers found the bodies of four children and a woman inside the hull after the boat was salvaged from the Shandhya River in the district of Barisal.

The boat, ML Oishi, went down on Wednesday with roughly 60 passengers on board when it was about to anchor at Dasherhaat station, some 110 kilometres south of the capital, Dhaka.

Akhteruzzaman said that relatives of passengers claimed that eight people were still missing.

“Most of those aboard were able to swim ashore while five passengers were rescued,’’ he said.

Report says that many of the boats plying Bangladesh’s waterways do not maintain passenger registers, causing accidents to be more frequent in the country which is criss-crossed by over 300 rivers.

While the government has launched an investigation into the accident, an official at the Barisal Port Authority said that the boat was overcrowded.

In February, 2015, no fewer than 70 people died after a double-deck ferry was hit by a cargo vessel and capsized in a river in central Bangladesh.

Almost 150 people were killed in March, 2012, after an overcrowded ferry carrying about 200 passengers sank in central Bangladesh when it was hit by an oil tanker.