Senegal abandoned recovery of victims from the MS Joola on Tuesday, with only 80 of 970-plus identified – saying its next step might be to sink the doomed ferry together with its dead to the Atlantic Ocean floor.
Senegal’s government suffered its first backlash on Tuesday for Africa’s deadliest ferry disaster ever, with Cabinet ministers for the armed forces and transport resigning.
President Abdoulaye Wade promised criminal prosecution for what he called negligence in the last voyage of the overcrowded state-run ferry – built for 600, and holding more than 1 000 when it capsized.
In a grim address late on Tuesday on state-run television, Wade called it ”a catastrophe grounded in human error.”
”The numerous errors uncovered will be punished, without haste but with diligence and with clear-headedness, based on investigations” already under way, he said.
Only 64 of the 1 034 confirmed aboard are known to have survived when the MS Joola sank in a fierce gale just before midnight on Thursday.
Wade conceded that the true toll might be even higher. Ticketing agents said that 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,” Wade told CNN in an interview earlier. ”So it might happen the definitive number is over 1 034.” Divers said decay after five days in the 30 centigrade Atlantic waters made removal of intact victims impossible.
Medical teams said they had made only 80 identifications of dead – and that there was no hope of more.
Senegal’s government gave fishermen, villagers and the public at large permission to bury dead as they found them — after notifying authorities, and photographing each corpse.
Interior Minister Mamadou Niang said authorities now were trying to decide what to do with the hundreds of dead, deemed irretrievable, inside the ferry.
”It’s a delicate decision, whether we will to try to tow the boat in or allow it to sink to the ocean floor,” Niang told reporters.
He cited another proposal: ”To leave the boat there and make a monument out of it.”
The German shipyard that built the ferry for Senegal 12 years ago 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.
However, the boat was being used as it was intended — for sea voyages within 50 nautical miles of the coast, said George Hoeckels, a manager with shipmaker Neue Germersheimer Schiffswerft.
An influential business leaders’ union in southern Senegal called for the government’s resignation.
”People showed a lack of vigilance, and in a democracy, someone has to pay,” the group’s leader, Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, said in an interview on Tuesday in a leading Senegal daily, the Walfadjri.
Late on Tuesday, Transport Minister Youssouf Sakho and Armed Forces Minister Youba Sambou resigned.
In his address, Wade said the two ministers were the ones charged with the safe operation of the ferry.
”After we have cried for our dead and prayed for them, we must examine ourselves,” Wade said. ”The vices at the base of this catastrophe are … our habits of laxity, of lack of seriousness, of irresponsibility, sometimes even of greed so that some tolerate what they know perfectly well are dangerous situations simply because they can make a profit.”
Rescue officials said only 25 bodies have been handed over to the families, and at least four sites in the countries have been selected for cemeteries. Every unidentified victim will receive a single grave and be given numbered markers. – Sapa-AP