July 11, 2002	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 29, 1423

DHAKA, July 10: Six people have died and up to a million have been marooned or made homeless by floods triggered by monsoon rains in northern and western Bangladesh, newspapers reported on Wednesday.

Disaster Ministry officials in Dhaka on Wednesday played down the reports, saying they had no information on major flooding although there was localized water-logging in low-lying villages and farmland.

“We have sporadic reports of initial floods from some district officials in affected areas, but none mentioned yet any major damage to property or loss of life,” an official at the ministry’s flood monitoring centre in Dhaka told AFP.

But Dhaka’s daily Ittefaq newspaper said up to one million people were marooned in northern districts where water from neighbouring flood-hit Indian states was running into rivers there.

It said in some frontier villages of the southwestern Jessore district, some 100,000 people were subjected to “inhuman living” conditions due to swelling waters.

Two other mass-circulation dailies — Jugantar and Janakantha — reported six deaths in the floods.—AFP