Dhaka: In a tragic accident, at least 43 school children were killed and over 30 others missing after a over crowded truck carrying them plunged into a canal near Bangladesh's southeastern port city of Chittagong on Monday.
Police and witnesses said that the truck carrying an estimated 75 primary school children, aged between nine to 14, was returning home after a football match at a local stadium when it skidded off the road and landed into the canal at Mirresarai area, 240 kilometres southeast of the capital.
"We have counted so far 43 bodies...several more were still missing and the real casualty figure can be higher," Mirersarai police station chief Iftekhar Hossain said while unconfirmed reports put the figure at 50.
At least 15 of the students managed to jump out of the truck and swam ashore and several of them told reporters at a local hospital that they were in a happy mood, singing and dancing as it fell into the ditch, believed to be caused by rough drive by the driver on the narrow country road.
Witnesses said army and navy divers were called out to join fore brigade rescuers as several of the bodies were missing even after the truck was salvaged from the waters.
"The rescuers and local residents retrieved 43 bodies but several more could still be under the water," a television channel reported quoting a police official at the scene.
Chittagong's police chief ZA Morshed said fire service personnel pulled the truck out of the ditch around 4:45 pm and no more bodies were found inside the wreckage.
Witnesses said most of the victims died because of drowning in water while television reports said at least six of the 13 children were critically wounded as they were being treated at three separate facilities.
Television footage showed hundreds of relatives awaited in grim face as the rescuers looked for bodies in the ditch while reports said the father of one of the victims died of heart attack.
The local residents staged a joint funeral prayer for the victims at a local ground where bodies of several children belonging to minority Hindu community were also brought as thousands of people gathered at the scene to mourn, pray and have glimpses of the bodies.
President Zillur Rahman and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina mourned the deaths and prayed for eternal peace of the departed souls while they ordered steps for appropriate treatments of the injured.
Frequent road accidents earned Bangladesh bad repute in terms of road safety with a recent study by the Dhaka-based Accident Research Centre saying that more than 12,000 people die in road accidents in the country every year.
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