BY JAMEY KEATEN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - Senegal abandoned the recovery
of victims from the MS Joola Tuesday, with only 80 of
at least 970 identified - saying its next step might
be to sink the doomed ferry together with its dead to
the Atlantic Ocean floor.
Senegal's government suffered its first backlash
Tuesday for Africa's deadliest ferry disaster ever,
with Cabinet ministers for the armed forces and
transport resigning.
President Abdoulaye Wade promised criminal prosecution
for what he called negligence in the last voyage of
the state-run ferry - built for 600, and holding more
than 1,000 when it capsized.
"There will be prosecutions, of course," Wade told
CNN. "Under our law, if a person by negligence
provokes an accident or the death of a person, he has
to be tried. And the people that will have any
responsibility will be before the courts."
Authorities now were trying to decide what to do with
the hundreds of dead, deemed irretrievable, inside the
ferry, Interior Minister Mamadou Niang said.
"It's a delicate decision, whether we will to try to
tow the boat in or allow it to sink to the ocean
floor," Niang told reporters. Or "to leave the boat
there and make a monument out of it."
Only 64 of the 1,034 confirmed aboard are known to
have survived when the MS Joola sank in a fierce gale
just be-fore midnight Thursday.
Wade conceded that the true toll might be even higher.
Ticketing agents told The Associated Press that
children under 5 would have gone unticketed - and thus
apparently uncounted in the toll of dead.
"We know the people on the boat did not mention the
babies, and the girls and boys," Wade told CNN. "So it
might happen the definitive number is over 1,034."
Divers said decay after five days in the 85 degrees
Fahrenheit Atlantic waters made removal of intact
victims im-possible.
Medical teams said they had made only 80
identifications of dead - and that there was no hope
of more.
Senegal's government gave fishermen, villagers and the
public at large permission to bury dead as they found
them - after notifying authorities, and photographing
each corpse.
The German shipyard that built the ferry for Senegal
12 years ago confirmed that the vessel had been
designed for 536 passengers and 64 crew - nearly half
the number Senegal says was aboard at the time of the
disaster.
However, the boat was being used as it was intended -
for sea voyages within 50 nautical miles of the coast,
said George Hoeckels, a manager with shipmaker Neue
Germersheimer Schiffswerft.
An influential business leaders' union in southern
Senegal called for the government's resignation.
"People showed a lack of vigilance, and in a
democracy, someone has to pay," the group's leader,
Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, said in an interview Tuesday in
a leading Senegal daily, the Walfadjri.
Late Tuesday, Transport Minister Youssouf Sakho and
Armed Forces Minister Youba Sambou resigned. Wade
spokeswoman Rama Ndao said the resignations were not
solicited.
Rescue officials said only 25 bodies have been handed
over to the families, and at least four sites in the
countries have been selected for cemeteries. Every
unidentified victim will receive a single grave and be
given numbered markers.
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