At least 27 people were feared drowned when a cargo boat on which they were traveling capsized during a heavy storm on Lake Victoria, Tanzanian police said on Thursday.
The cargo vessel MV Nyamageni was carrying 27 people and 100 crates of soda and beer from the town of Bukoba to the port of Mwanza when it capsized on Saturday, said Ignas Mbinga, regional police commander for western Tanzania.
News of the incident only became public on Thursday due to the remote area in which it occurred, he said.
”We have only recovered 100 empty crates of beer and soda but we are yet to recover a single body,” said Mbinga from Kagera, about 700km west of Tanzania’s commercial capital of Dar es Salaam.
”The weather in the lake was very bad,” he said, adding that police have deployed divers to search for the missing.
Mbinga refused to explicitly say whether those on the boat had died, but made clear it was unlikely there were any survivors.
The accident was the fourth such incident in Tanzanian waters on Lake Victoria this year. About 36 people drowned when their boat capsized during a heavy storm earlier this month. – Sapa-AFP