The Investigation Into Africa's Deadliest Maritime Disaster | Last 5 Minutes of Le Joola

On the night of 26 September 2002, a ferry certified for 536 people sailed into the Atlantic carrying close to 2,000. Five minutes after she met a squall off the coast of The Gambia, at least 1,863 of them were dead — more than died on the Titanic. Almost no one outside Senegal knows her name. This is the real-time reconstruction of the loss of Le Joola: the worst peacetime maritime disaster of this century, and the one the world largely failed to notice. There was no iceberg, no war, no bomb. There was a twelve-year-old roll-on/roll-off ferry on a route an entire region depended on, a passenger list nearly four times the certified limit, and a ship that was already leaning as she left the dock at Ziguinchor. ✅ SOURCES Findings in this video are drawn from the official Senegalese commission of inquiry into the loss of Le Joola (2003), the French judicial investigation opened on behalf of French victims and its dismissal on jurisdictional grounds, and contemporaneous reporting and survivor testimony. Full source list and page references are in the pinned comment. DISCLOSURE❗️ This video contains altered or synthetic content. Portions of the visuals are AI-assisted reconstruction, used only for moments no camera recorded, and the narration is AI-voiced. All factual claims come from the documented record; nothing in the sequence of events is invented or dramatised beyond what the sources support.