AKIPRESS.COM - At least 44 people have drowned with dozens more feared dead after a ferry sank in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria this evening. More than 300 people were on board the MV Nyerere when it sank just a few metres from the dock in Ukerewe district, Metro reports. 

A senior local official said the final death toll could be more than 200, after it emerged the vessel was overcrowded at the time.

John Mongella, the commissioner of Mwanza, said 37 people in total have been rescued.

The rescue mission has now been been halted until dawn tomorrow.

Theresia Mwami, a spokeswoman for national ferry services operator TEMESA, said the operator had carried out maintenance on the ferry in recent months, overhauling two engines. In 1996, a ferry disaster on Lake Victoria in the same region killed at least 500 people.

In 2012, at least 145 people died in a ferry disaster in Tanzania’s semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, on a vessel that was overcrowded.