At least 60 drowned in Cameroon boat capsize

YAOUNDE, Feb 5 (Reuters) At least 60 people drowned at sea off southwest Cameroon at the weekend when a wooden motor boat packed with passengers and cargo capsized on its way to neighbouring Nigeria, a local official said today.

Peter Itoe, the Divisional Officer at Limbe, a coastal town lying beneath Mount Cameroon, said there were only 15 survivors from the accident, which occurred late on Saturday off the coast between Mabeta Island and Debundscha.

''Yesterday, we buried some 60 bodies in mass graves ... We believe that all the other passengers are missing at sea,'' Itoe told Reuters.

Fon Achobang, a local reporter for the Limbe-based newspaper Eden, said survivors whom he interviewed told him that the boat had left the village of Tiko, near Limbe, and was ferrying passengers and cargo to Oron in neighbouring Nigeria.

''But as it moved along, they kept on taking on more passengers, so much so that by the time the boat capsized there were over 100 passengers on board,'' Achobang said.

He added he and other colleagues saw 63 bodies being buried yesterday after the accident.

The survivors who struggled ashore in darkness had taken hours to traverse forest and swamp before being able to raise the alarm.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear.

But Itoe said a flotilla of vessels known locally as ''engine boats'' regularly plied the sea route from southwest Cameroon to Oron and Calabar in neighbouring Nigeria.

Most of the boats taking this sea passage off coastal creeks and mangrove swamps -- a much more direct route from Cameroon to Nigeria than by road -- were heavily overloaded, Itoe said.

Achobang said the survivors told him most of those on board the capsized boat had been Nigerians who were living in Cameroon, some working as farmers and fishermen.

Shipwrecks and capsizes of unseaworthy vessels overloaded with passengers and cargo are common in west and central Africa.

Last March, at least 127 people disappeared and were feared drowned when a wooden boat travelling from Nigeria to Gabon sank in heavy seas off Cameroon's Atlantic port of Kribi.

In April, some 120 people went missing after a boat packed with passengers and merchandise overturned on Ghana's Lake Volta, one of the world's largest reservoirs.

REUTERS MS HS2326