Zimbabwe ferry capsize on Lake Kariba leaves dozens dead

At least 37 people have been reported dead and their bodies retrieved from a lake in Zimbabwe after a passenger ferry capsized, according to local officials.

Police said earlier on Tuesday, local time, that a boat carrying 90 passengers and five crew members had capsized on Lake Kariba, on the nation’s border with Zambia, but did not give a death toll or say how many people had been rescued.

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation cited a local official as saying that 114 tickets had been issued for the ferry’s journey, suggesting more people were on board.

Zimbabwe’s Civil Protection Unit said in a statement it could only confirm there were 114 adult passengers onboard, along with five crew members.

There could have been an unknown number of children below ticketing age who were onboard and not accounted for, the unit said.

Zimbabwe’s The Herald newspaper then first reported that 15 bodies had been recovered and 27 people, including children, were still missing.

Within hours the news outlet reported more bodies had been pulled from the water and the death toll had risen to 37.

Zimbabwe’s the national disaster management agency also said 77 people had been rescued and made it to a small island on the lake, with boats dispatched to bring the survivors back.

Zimbabwean state broadcaster ZBC published video of speedboats making their way to what appeared to be an overturned boat on the lake as a helicopter hovered overhead.

An underwater team for search and rescue operations was deployed on the huge lake.

Mutsa Murombedzi, a local member of parliament, posted a video of what she said were people on shore waving off what appeared to be the aging ferry at the start of its journey.

She said rural communities use the boat to travel along the lake to the town of Kariba, a journey that usually takes about five hours.

Some people standing on the shore were also concerned about whether the ferry would survive strong waves on the lake, according to the video.

Kariba is the largest man-made lake in the world by volume and was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by building a dam wall to block the Zambezi River.

Its construction resulted in a valley slowly filling with water to form a huge lake that is now more than 200 kilometres long and up to 40 kilometres wide in places.

Wires