At least 21 people have drowned, while others remain missing, after a passenger ferry sank on the Nile in northern Sudan’s River Nile State, civil defence officials have said, in the war-ravaged nation.

The Sudanese Sovereignty Council issued a press statement mourning the deaths of 21 people, including women and children.

Police Major General Qurashi Hussein, Sudan’s assistant director general of civil defence, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that six or seven people had been rescued, while efforts were continuing to recover about a dozen people believed missing.

The wooden passenger ferry had been carrying 30-35 passengers, including women, elderly people and children, when it sank on Wednesday evening while travelling between the villages of Tayba al-Khawad and Deim al-Qarai in the Shendi district of River Nile State, Hussein said.

Teams sent from capital

Hussein added that teams had been sent from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, to assist with the operation, with all civil defence teams in River Nile State being mobilised to search for the missing.

“Our teams are still searching for bodies of those who drowned in the Nile,” he said.

The Sudan Doctors Network, an association of Sudanese medical professionals, said in a post on X that the tragedy highlighted “the fragility of river transport” in the country and “the absence of basic safety requirements”.

It also claimed that a slow response from local authorities and civil defence teams in the critical initial hours following the sinking had “exacerbated the scale of the disaster”.

The group said it demanded that authorities respond with “immediate measures to ensure the safety of river transport and prevent the recurrence of such disasters that claim the lives of the innocent”.

Wednesday’s sinking is not the first tragedy on the river in the northern Sudanese state. In 2018, at least 23 people, most of them children, drowned when their boat sank in the Nile while they were being taken to school.

•PHOTO:Sudanese and people from other nationalities cross the Nile river in a ferry, after being evacuated from Khartoum to the upper reaches of the Nile in Aswan, Egypt in April 2023