At least 24 children on their way to school and a health worker have drowned when their boat sank in northern Sudan.<\/p>\n
More than 40 children were on the boat, whose engine failed in a strong current as it crossed a 2.5km (1.6m) flooded area near the River Nile.<\/p>\n
The children, who were between the ages of seven and 16, began to panic, leaned to one side and the boat overturned, the school’s headmaster told the BBC.<\/p>\n
Only two bodies have been found.<\/p>\n
Ab el-Khayr Adam Yunis, the headmaster of the Kenba High School, said the pupils usually go to school on foot, but have been using a boat for the past week due to flooding after heavy rain.<\/p>\n
“Those who died were mostly girls,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa radio programme.<\/p>\n
“One family lost five daughters, and another three families lost two children each, and two families lost three children each.”<\/p>\n
The telephone network was down due to the rains, making it difficult for the headmaster to report the accident.<\/p>\n
As soon as the phones started working, they contacted all the big towns nearby – Abu Hamad, Karima and Ed-Damer – but were still waiting for help after five hours, he said.<\/p>\n
The area’s residents are mostly from the Manaseer tribe. They have long raised concerns about the flooding of their land due to the construction of a controversial dam, BBC’s Mohanad Hashim reports.<\/p>\n
Sudan’s annual rainy season lasts from June until late October.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At least 24 children on their way to school and a health worker have drowned when their boat sank in northern Sudan. More than 40 children were on the boat, whose engine failed in a strong current as it crossed a 2.5km (1.6m) flooded area near the River Nile. The children, who were between the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3408,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3406\/revisions\/3408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}