Dakar, Senegal ? Divers smashed the windows of the capsized Senegalese ferry MS Joola and hauled out victims of one of Africa’s worst ferry disasters. At least 180 bodies have been recovered from more than 730 people believed dead.

Wailing relatives some collapsing in grief cried Saturday for news of the missing.

Barricades held back crowds who stood vigil by the hundreds overnight at the main naval base in Dakar, Senegal’s capital waiting to know, for some, whether whole families had perished.

“I have been waiting 22 hours for information!” Daouda Diot, seeking news of his wife in the ocean ferry’s sinking, shouted at military police who were fending off the distraught family members at the base.

The crowds took care of women who fell to the ground in the rising anger, tension and grief. Some dropped in dead faints or shook uncontrollably.

By midafternoon Saturday, divers had pulled at least 180 corpses from the ferry, which turned on its side, then capsized Thursday night in a fierce Atlantic Ocean gale.

Only 62 among the 796 passengers and crew are known to have survived all rescued by fishing boats in the first hours, after what for some were hours clinging to the overturned hull.

French and Senegalese search planes and vessels converged Saturday in the area of the disaster.

The MS Joola was on its way to Dakar from Senegal’s fertile southern region of Casamance when it capsized off Gambia, a miles-wide former British colony surrounded on three sides by Senegal.

France, Senegal’s colonial ruler, said it had lent a naval rescue plane, a military helicopter and divers and two ships to help Senegal’s military.