The toll included at least 121 people who died when a ferry sank in a storm late Monday on the Buriganga river, while another 52 were declared drowned after a boat carrying a wedding party capsized the same day in the Kishoreganj district.

News reports Wednesday said at least 20 more people were killed in storms while scores were injured by lightning strikes, collapsing houses, falling trees and the sinking of small boats.

The government Wednesday ordered a partial ban on ferry operations in a bid to stop further disasters.

Until further notice ferries will not be allowed to operate for five hours daily from 3pm, which is the time storms usually hit, officials said.

Salvage operations continued Wednesday with two cranes bringing up the double decker ferry MV Mitali which sank on the Buriganga in Narayanganj district, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of capital Dhaka.

Three bodies were found inside the vessel taking the toll to 121, said a police officer.

It went down with between 200 and 300 people on board. Some swam to safety, but police could not say if anyone was still missing because the boat had no passenger manifest, a common omission in Bangladesh.

In the other accident in the northern Kishoreganj district, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Dhaka, divers Wednesday found five bloated bodies of the 52 people already declared dead.

"We found the bodies floating, but we have lost track of the ferry after tracing it yesterday," local official Noni Gopal Biswas told AFP by telephone.

The accidents were blamed by the media on overcrowding, although officials denied the allegations.

Ferry disasters are common in Bangladesh, which is criss-crossed by about 230 rivers. Some 3,000 ferries ply the nation's waterways and are a key means of transport, although many of them are dangerously overcrowded.

Since 1977, more than 3,000 people have died in about 260 accidents.

Meanwhile the bad weather continued, with a tropical storm late Tuesday damaging five aircraft belonging to the national airline Biman which were parked at Dhaka's Zia International Airport, officials said.

Several air force jets were damaged when Bangladesh was hit by a massive cyclone in 1991 that killed more than 135,000 people.

The metereological department said the storm had winds of up to 116 kilometres (72 miles) per hour.

"It was a normal storm we have around this time of the year and we had issued squall warnings," M. Akram Hossain, chief government metereologist, told AFP.

SPACE.WIRE