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The festive cruises filled with music and alcoholic beverages around Lake Victoria are a rite of pbadage for young Ugandans looking for entertainment, but the one that fell to the water on Saturday night seemed doomed to failure .
The wrecked ship was in bad shape and had been moored for some time before people began to pile it up near Kampala, the Ugandan capital, authorities told the Associated Press. The owners of the boat did not have a license to operate and overloaded the boat far beyond safety.
To make matters worse, the bad weather had made the water of Africa's biggest lake treacherous.
Party-goers – including a Ugandan artist and a prince – were apparently unaware of the danger before it was too late.
The problems started towards the middle of the cruise, not far from the coast.
Divers look up as a helicopter looks for victims of a boat that capsized in Lake Victoria, near the Ugandan capital, Kampala. (Stephen Wandera / AP)
Around 7 pm, the boat sank and sank, spilling about 90 people into the lake – although by some estimates up to 120 people were crammed into the boat. Nested revelers suddenly found themselves hovering in the water, facing a life and death scenario.
Many of them were not wearing a lifejacket, the authorities said, and their drunkenness probably exacerbated the panic.
Witnesses said they heard people scream for help, stomp water or try to swim to the shore.
"They shouted," Help us! Help us! "And the boat sank very fast," said Sam Tukei, one of the many men who used fishing canoes to try to rescue people. "By the time the police arrived, we had saved a lot of people."
According to the BBC, two fishing boats that helped the pbadengers were submerged and capsized.
Government rescue teams arrived a little later, sending divers to Lake Victoria to recover at least 33 bodies over the next two days, according to Reuters.
On Monday, the third day of the salvage mission, police and government teams attempted to extract the wreckage from the lake boat to determine if any other bodies were under it, according to the police. According to NBS TV, based in Uganda, officials use fishing nets to extract the bodies from the water.
Dozens of family members and friends spent a good portion of the weekend gathered along the shore, peering through a fence, emitting shouts or occasional shrieks at the sight of one's body. being expensive being removed from the water, reported the BBC. Others have searched pullovers, wallets, keys and shoes, in the hope of identifying the dead.
The music artist Iryn Namubiru, according to the BBC, and Prince Daudi Kintu Wasajja, brother of the king of Buganda, Uganda's largest traditional kingdom, have been found.
The boat belonged to a man named Templa Bissase or Bissaso and his wife, according to a statement by President Yoweri Museveni to the Ugandan Daily Monitor on Sunday. The boat came from a private beach and had the capacity to carry 50 people – but it was unregistered, unlicensed and possibly uninsured.
The music of the boat festival was so strong, said Museveni's statement, that the people on board "may not have heard the captain's orders of emergency".
Shamirah Nsereko, a survivor, told NTV Uganda Sunday night that the captain had repeatedly warned pbadengers that the boat was taking water and listing. They may not have heard it on the music.
"But then you talk to people so drunk," she said.
"Suddenly, we saw one of the (musical) speakers fall off, that's when things got really worse."
Police carry the body of a victim after a boat capsized in Lake Victoria. (Stephen Wandera / AP)
Boat accidents are becoming more common on the great lakes of East Africa, including Lake Victoria, surrounded by Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya and larger than Switzerland.
Saturday's tragedy was the second large-scale sinking on Lake Victoria in two months. In September, nearly 150 people died after a ferry carrying hundreds of people capsized on the Tanzanian side of the lake. the BBC reported. The capacity of the ferry was 100 people, but 400 people had boarded, many of them carrying goods to nearby markets.
[A lobster boat captain said a freak storm killed his crew. Then doctors found drugs in his system.]
Critics have directed their anger against the government, accused of using a too small and overloaded ferry on a busy road that crosses Lake Victoria half a dozen times a day. Aggravating issues: It was market day and the ferry was also loaded with supplies, including large bags of cement and corn.
"We are really saddened and urge the government to provide a new ferry because the old was small and the population large," said Editha Josephat Magesa, a resident who lost an aunt, her father and younger brother, during the tragedy of the boat in September. BBC.
But closer to Uganda, as authorities continued to remove bodies from the water, it was unclear who, if any, would be held responsible for the deaths this weekend.
The husband and wife who owned the boat were among the victims.
"Obviously, the operators of this boat will be charged with criminal negligence and manslaughter, if they have not already been punished for their mistake in dying in the accident", said Museveni in his statement.
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