Twenty one feared dead in Vietnam boat accidents

Updated at 3.48pm

HANOI: Twenty one people, 19 of them children, may have died in central Vietnam in two boat accidents, officials and state media said on Sunday.   

A boat went down early on Saturday while ferrying children to their morning class in Nghe An province, and 19 children aboard might have drowned, a district policeman said.   

Earlier, another policeman put the total of dead and missing were 20.   

"The water current was strong and we fear all of the missing children may have died," he said by telephone from Con Cuong district, more than 400 km south of Hanoi.   

A government report on Sunday said rescuers had retrieved two bodies.   

In another accident, two men were missing since Friday as their boat capsized in a river in the central highland province of Dak Nong, the Defence Ministry-run People's Army newspaper said on Sunday.   

Floods rose and receded quickly on Friday after torrential rain, having submerged more than 100 houses near a river in Dak Nong, the newspaper has reported.   

There were no reports of damages on the coffee crop.   

Dak Nong lies in Vietnam's key coffee-growing region which was skirted by Typhoon Xangsane after it slammed into the central coastal region last Sunday.   

Traders say flash floods would cause little harm to coffee trees which are grown high on hillsides. But Nghe An was one of nine provinces hit by Typhoon Xangsane before it moved to Laos and dissipated in Thailand. Heavy rains afterwards raised river waters to dangerous levels.   

The typhoon and floods after it have killed 179 people in the Philippines and Vietnam. Of the 69 deaths in Vietnam, 11 have been in Nghe An province, the government said.