72 drown in Iraq ferry accident
baghdad — A ferry overloaded with people celebrating the Kurdish new year sank in the Tigris River near the Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday, killing at least 72 people, mostly women and children, officials said.
Col. Hussam Khalil, head of the Civil Defence in the northern Nineveh province, said the accident occurred as scores of people were out in a tourist area celebrating Nowruz, which marks the Kurdish new year and the arrival of spring.
Health Ministry spokesman Seif Al Badr said the dead include 33 women and 19 children. —
19 Children were among the boat victims
55 People have been rescued
mosul (iraq) — A ferry packed with families celebrating Kurdish New Year sank in a swollen river in the former militant stronghold of Mosul on Thursday, leaving more than 70 people dead in Iraq’s worst accident in years.
There was an outpouring of grief among residents who only recently resumed festivities on the banks of the Tigris after the northern city’s recapture from the Daesh group.
The vessel was packed with men, women and children crossing the Tigris to go to a popular picnic area to celebrate Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year and a holiday day across the country.
While war and militant attacks have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq in recent years, such accidents are relatively rare.
“It’s a disaster, no one expected that,” said a young man who had just managed to reached the shore. “There were a lot of people on the boat, especially women and children,” he said.
Seventy-two people died including 19 children, according to interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan, while 55 people were rescued. “The boat sank because there were too many passengers on board, more than a hundred,” another security official based in Mosul said. The health ministry said earlier that 33 women were among those killed.
The authorities had warned people to be careful after several days of heavy rains led to water being released through the Mosul dam, causing the river level to rise.
Videos shared on social media showed a fast-flowing, bloated river and dozens of people in the water around the partly submerged boat.
Search operations were continuing hundreds of metres downstream from the site where the boat sank, according to a journalist.
Hundreds of people who had flocked to the forested area for the first days of spring gathered on the river banks as the disaster unfolded.
Ambulances and police vehicles transported the dead and wounded to hospitals in the city of nearly two million people. Photos of victims, many of them women and children, were posted on the walls of a morgue for families unable to enter because of the large crowd outside to identify their relatives.
Previously Iraq’s last major boat disaster was in March 2013 when a floating restaurant sank in Baghdad, killing five people.
Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi put health services on alert and instructed all available teams to mobilise to find survivors. —
33 Women were among those killed