Dozens of people have been killed after a sudden thunderstorm capsized a tourist boat in Vietnam.
At least 34 people died after the sightseeing vessel was turned upside down by strong winds during a tour of Ha Long Bay on Saturday, state media reported.
The Wonder Sea boat was carrying 48 passengers and five crew members. Authorities had earlier reported that 12 people had been rescued, but later revised the figure to 11. Another eight people remain missing.
A 14-year-old boy was among the survivors and said he was rescued four hours after being trapped in the overturned hull.
“I took a deep breath, dived, then swam up. I even shouted for help, then I was pulled up by a boat,” the boy, who had been travelling with his parents, told VietnamNet.
The newspaper said that most of the passengers were tourists, including about 20 children, from the country’s capital of Hanoi.
A national weather forecast said a tropical storm called Wipha is expected to hit Vietnam’s northern region, including Ha Long Bay’s coast, next week.
A witness told AFP news agency that the sky darkened around 2pm local time on Saturday (7am BST). He said there were “hailstones as big as toes with torrential rain, thunderstorm and lightning”.
A picture showed two people sitting on top of the capsized vessel in choppy water as rescue workers arrived to help them.
Last week, around 10 people who went missing after a boat capsized off Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands in West Sumatra province due to bad weather.
Eight others were rescued after the boat sank on Monday around 11am local time, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency said.
The boat had departed Sikakap, a small town in the Mentawai Islands, and was heading to another small town, Tuapejat. At least 10 government officials were among the 18 people on board the boat, according to reports.
Authorities deployed two boats and dozens of rescuers on Tuesday to find the missing people. The Indonesian authorities were reportedly informed of the accident around 5.40pm local time on Monday, about six hours after the boat sank.
Boats and ferries are a regular mode of transport in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and accidents are relatively common due to bad weather as well as lax safety standards that sometimes allow vessels to be overloaded.
