The death toll from a ferry accident in Zimbabwe rose to 44 as President Emmerson Mnangagwa declared the incident a state of disaster on Wednesday.
The vessel sank on Lake Kariba on Tuesday after it was hit by a strong wave and overturned, according to police.
The boat was built to carry 90 passengers, but more than 120 people may have been aboard as it crossed the lake bordering Zambia, police said in a statement.
The passengers included 12 children, according to the statement.
Numbers based on registered tickets
“The Zimbabwe Republic Police informs the public that the death toll in the Kariba boat accident is now 44,” it added.
Zimbabwe’s Civil Protection Unit (CPU) said on Wednesday that the boat was carrying at least 114 adult passengers and five crew members based on registered ticket sales.
An unknown number of children below ticketing age were also believed to be aboard, further complicating efforts to establish the total number of people on the vessel. Authorities said the boat had a capacity of 90 people.
Search continues
As search and rescue operations intensified, 77 people have so far been rescued from the boat, which provides transport between Kariba town, which borders neighboring Zambia, and several islands and fishing camps.
The 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.
Lake Kariba lies on Zimbabwe’s border with Zambia, more than 300km (186 miles) northeast of Harare.
It is the world’s largest man-made lake by volume and was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by building a dam wall to block the Zambezi River, resulting in a valley slowly filling with water to form a huge lake that is now more than 200km (124 miles) long and up to 40km (25 miles) wide in places.
