Senegal president pledges prosecution in ferry disaster

DAKAR, Senegal -- 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 before 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 impossible.

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.