Death toll from storms in Bangladesh tops 240

Dhaka India (Agencies): The death toll from storms which have ravaged Bangladesh rose tomore than 240, officials and reports said on Wednesday as further bad weather hit the capital Dhaka damaging several aircraft.

The toll included at least 129 people who died when a ferry sank in a storm late Monday on the Buriganga river, while another 52 were declared drowned after a boat carrying a wedding party capsized the same day in the Kishoreganj district.

News reports said at least 20 more people were killed by lightning strikes, collapsing houses, falling trees and the sinking of small boats caused by the storms.

The government on Wednesday ordered a partial ban on ferry operations in a bid to stop further disasters.

Until further notice ferries will not be allowed to operate lor five hours daily from 3 p.m., which is the time storms usually hit, officials said.

Two cranes on Wednesday salvaged the double decker ferry MV Mitali which sank on the Buriganga in Narayanganj district, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of capital Dhaka.

Twenty-one bodies were found inside the vessel taking tile toll to 129, said a police officer.

It went down with between 200 and 300 people on board. Some swam to safety, but police could not say if anyone was still missing because the boat had no passenger manifest, a common omission in Baghdad.

In the other accident in the northern Kishoregani district, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Dhaka, divers on Wednesday found five bloated bodies of the 52 people already declared dead.

"We found the bodies floating, but we have lost track of the ferry after tracing it yesterday," local official Noni Gopal Biswas told AFP by telephone.

Both ferries went down in storms, but the accidents were also blamed by the media on overcrowding, although officials denied the allegations.

Ferry disasters are common in Bangladesh, which is criss-crossed by about 230 rivers. Some 3,000 ferries ply the nation's waterways and are a key means of transport, although many of them are dangerously overcrowded.

Since 1977, more than 3,000 people have died in about 260 accidents.

Meanwhile, the bad weather continued, with a tropical storm late Tuesday damaging five aircraft belonging to the national airline Biman which were parked at Dhaka's Zia International Airport, officials said.

Biman spokesman Zahirul Huq told AFP the tail of an Airbus-300 was broken, while two others of the same type as well as a Boeing 737 and a Fokker F-28 suffered body damage.

"We now have to cancel and reschedule some of our flights and are desperately trying to bring two aircraft on short lease from Singapore," he said.

Several air force jets were damaged when Bangladesh was hit by a massive cyclone in 1991 that killed more than 135,000 people.

The meteorological department said Tuesday's storm had winds of up to 116 kilometers (72 miles) per hour.

Meanwhile, a thunderstorm killed at least 34 people and injured about 2,300 in neighboring northeast India overnight, uprooting trees and destroying shanty dwellings, police said on Wednesday.

Hundreds of villagers were missing and at least 20 villages spread over a large area had been affected.

"We've recovered 34 bodies and rescue workers are looking for hundreds of missing people," P. Bordoloi, district police chief, told Reuters by phone. "We are expecting more bodies."