102 missing as Russian river boat sinks

EMERGENCY officials say that 102 people, including dozens of children, are missing and at least one is dead after a passenger boat with more than 180 people on board sank in the Volga River yesterday.

The double-decker vessel went down 3km away from the nearest bank in the giant Kuibyshev reservoir on the Volga River, 750km east of Moscow, the Tatarstan region emergency ministry said. The depth at the site was 20 metres (65.62 feet), it said.

The spokeswoman for Emergencies Ministry in Moscow, Irina Andrianova said there were 135 passengers and 47 crew on board when the boat went down.

Authorities say a riverboat rescued some 75 passengers, while a lifeless body of an unidentified woman and one injured man were taken to hospital.

Other ships did not stop to pick up people, a survivor said.

“Two ships did not stop, although we waved our hands,” the survivor, a man in his 40s who arrived on the riverboat told Russia’s Vesti 24 television as he stood amid weeping passengers, some of them wrapped in blankets.

Vesti 24 quoted another survivor as saying that the boat “tilted to the right and sank within minutes”.

Some 30 children gathered in one of the cockpits minutes before the sinking, another survivor told the Interfax news agency.

Emergency teams and divers from neighbouring regions rushed to the site of the tragedy, and Tatarstan’s leader Rustam Minnikhanov interrupted his vacation to return to the region.

The Volga, Europe’s largest river in length and discharge, is up to 30km wide and a popular tourist attraction.

The boat, called Bulgaria, was built in 1955 in Czechoslovakia and belongs to a local tourism company.