About 12 bodies have been recovered from the scene of a boat mishap in River Shiroro in Munya Local Government Area of the state.
Among the rescued are 10 females and an eight-year-old boy.
The bodies were recovered with the help of a combined efforts of the marine police and some local divers in the areas.
All the recovered bodies have been buried at the river bank in Kuduru.
While the nine Christians among the dead were buried separately beside each other, the three Muslims were also buried their separately.
The Niger state Governor, Sani Bello who was represented by the Chief of Staff to the Governor, Hon. Mikhail Bmitoshi, described the incident as unfortunate and urged the people to see it as an act of God.
The Chief of Staff, accompanied by some top government functionaries from the area visited the scene of the mishap after traveling on boat for two and half hours for on the spot assessment of incident and to compensate with the families of the victims.
The government delegations arrived when villagers were burring the deceased.
Bmitoshi said that the state government will set up what he called water ways transport agency with a view to regulate the activities of boats operators in the state.
He pointed out that the government has discovered that all the boat operators in the state have no protective jackets for their passengers, stressing that “the government will make sure that no boat operators carry passengers without protective jackets when agency becomes operational”.
“The state has witnessed too many boat mishaps. The government will soon come up with an agency that will regulate and monitor their activities so as to avoid some of these avoidable incidents on our water ways”.
He disclosed that the state government will buy protective jackets and give to these operators at a subsidized rates, pointing out that “when that is done, no operator will be allowed to carry passengers without protective jackets”.
It could be recalled that a boat carrying about 60 people, five cows, six sheep, eight bags of maize, four bags of rice and some other food items capsized on river after it broke into two, 30 minutes into the two hours journey to Zumba market.
Also speaking at the scene of the incidents were the DG NSEMA, Ahmed Inga, and Commissioner of Gender Affairs, Mrs Roseline Abara, and some of the victims.