At least 21 people have drowned and several others remain missing after a passenger ferry sank on the Nile in northern Sudan’s River Nile State, officials said, marking yet another tragedy in the war-affected country.
The Sudanese Sovereignty Council issued a statement mourning the deaths, which include women and children.
Police Major General Qurashi Hussein, Sudan’s assistant director general of civil defence, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that six or seven passengers had been rescued, while efforts continue to locate roughly a dozen others still missing.
The wooden ferry, carrying between 30 and 35 people — including women, elderly passengers, and children — capsized on Wednesday evening while travelling between the villages of Tayba al-Khawad and Deim al-Qarai in the Shendi district of River Nile State, Hussein said.
Rescue teams from the capital, Khartoum, have been dispatched to assist local civil defence units, all of which have been mobilized to search for the missing. “Our teams are still searching for bodies of those who drowned in the Nile,” Hussein said.
The Sudan Doctors Network, an association of Sudanese medical professionals, highlighted the incident on X, warning that it exposed “the fragility of river transport” and the “absence of basic safety requirements” in the country.
The group also criticized delays in the initial response from local authorities and civil defence teams, saying it “exacerbated the scale of the disaster.”
The network urged authorities to implement “immediate measures to ensure the safety of river transport and prevent the recurrence of such tragedies that claim innocent lives.”
The incident echoes past tragedies on Sudan’s waterways. In 2018, at least 23 people — most of them children — drowned when their boat sank on the Nile while transporting them to school, highlighting persistent safety concerns in the country’s river transport system.
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