At least 44 people have drowned after a passenger ferry capsized Thursday afternoon on Lake Victoria in Tanzania.
Officials said they expected the death toll to rise when the search begins again Friday at daybreak.
Regional commissioner John Mongella said 37 people had been rescued but that some were in “a very bad condition.”
He would not speculate on how many people were on the ferry, but it is not uncommon for ferries that ply the region’s vast lakes to carry hundreds of passengers at a time.
According to Tanzanian government records, 894 people died when the MV Bukoba capsized on Lake Victoria in May 1996.
More recently, 200 people were confirmed dead when the MV Spice Islander I sank off the coast of the archipelago of Zanzibar in 2011. More than 1,000 were reported missing.
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