DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - At least 10 people died after a passenger ferry capsized on Thursday in Tanzania's Lake Victoria, state radio said, as operations to rescue survivors got under way.
The boat, the MV Nyerere, sank during the afternoon just a few metres from the dock in the Ukerewe district, national ferry services operator TEMESA said.
The service had yet to establish how many passengers were on board, spokeswoman Theresia Mwami said. State radio said 26 people had been rescued.
Mwami said TEMESA had carried out maintenance on the ferry in recent months, overhauling two engines.
In 1996, a ferry disaster on Lake Victoria in the same region killed at least 500 people.
In 2012, at least 145 people died in a ferry disaster in Tanzania's semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, on a vessel that was overcrowded.
(Reporting by Nuzulack Dausen; Additional reporting by George Obulutsa in Nairobi; Writing by Maggie Fick; Editing by Hugh Lawson and John Stonestreet)