Bangladesh | At least 37 dead in overloaded ferry fire

(Jhalkathi) At least 37 people were killed in an overloaded ferry fire in Bangladesh on Friday, burned to death or drowned after jumping overboard in the dead of night, a common tragedy in the poor South Asian country.

L’Obhijan 10, a three-story ferry, caught fire in the middle of a river around 3 a.m. near the town of Jhalkathi, 250 km south of the capital Dhaka. According to local police, the tragedy left 37 dead, a hundred injured and dozens missing.

At daybreak, rescuers searched the charred carcass of the ship, removing bodies wrapped in plastic shrouds, while shocked survivors and families of passengers rushed to the scene desperately searched for their loved ones.

“I just found my mother-in-law’s body. She jumped into the river and drowned. I don’t know what happened to my wife and children, ”said one of the passengers, Mohammad Russell.

“I went to the hospital. My wife and children weren’t there. I hope they survived by jumping into the water. May Allah save them, ”he continues in tears.

Thrown into the river

Another passenger, Mohammad Ismail, said he pushed his mother overboard into the “very cold” water and pulled her to shore. But when he returned to the stricken vessel aboard a fishing boat, his wife and one of his daughters were missing.

“I saw someone die in the flames,” he told AFP. “My other daughter survived because of someone who threw her in the water.”

“We recovered 37 bodies. The toll could increase, ”local police chief Moinul Islam told AFP. Around 100 people with burns were hospitalized, he added.

Some passengers said they saw small flames in the engine room as the ferry departed from Sadarghat port in Dhaka around 9 p.m. Thursday.

“Many people ran for shelter when the fire spread. Many passengers could not get out of the cabins where they slept. Many jumped into the river, ”said another survivor at the university hospital in the nearby town of Barisal.

Help arrived on site within an hour of the start of the fire and evacuated the injured to hospitals, said Johar Ali, district administrator.

“We spoke to passengers. And they say there were between 500 and 700 passengers, ”he told AFP.

“The fire lasted four or five hours before it was extinguished. The ferry was completely destroyed, but they managed to bring it back to shore, ”he added.

The accident is the latest in a series of similar disasters in the low-lying country located around a delta made up of hundreds of rivers.

Millions of people in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, rely heavily on ferries for their transport, especially in the southern coastal region. But the ships are insecure.

Experts point to the lack of vessel maintenance, lax safety standards and overcrowding on ferries.

The ship which caught fire on Friday was however recent, according to the authorities. “It’s a new ship. It was built in 2019 and had received authorization to navigate until 2022, ”Golam Sadek, head of the Bangladesh Inland Waterways Transport Authority, told AFP.

In August, a collision of a ferry and a cargo ship carrying sand left at least 21 dead on a lake in the east of the country. In April and May, 54 people died in two separate crashes.