MANAMA -- At least 57 people, including Westerners and Asians, were killed when an overcrowded leisure boat sank off the coast of Bahrain late on Thursday, turning a company dinner cruise into tragedy.

Among the dead were 17 Indians and 13 Britons, interior ministry spokesman Colonel Tarek Al Hassan said on Friday as rescuers continued to comb the Gulf waters for bodies and survivors.

Others came from South Africa, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Indian Ambassador to Bahrain Balkrishna Shetty said that he had been notified of 18 deaths among the Indian group on the doomed boat and he feared that the toll could rise.

Bodies were brought by boat to the shore of the tiny Gulf island state, where they were wrapped in white sheets, while shocked survivors were huddled in wool blankets.

The traditional wooden boat known as a Banoosh had been chartered for a dinner cruise for a company outing and was carrying 137 people when it capsized about a mile (almost two kilometers) out to sea.

"The boat was sailing slowly when it tilted around 30 degrees on one side, then tilted suddenly on the other side and started to sink," said Indian survivor Kungumon Kuzhiyilthekkathil.

"I was on the second floor when I suddenly fell in the sea," he said. "One of the passengers saved me. I consider myself lucky."

The boat's owner accused the tourist company that chartered the boat of overloading the vessel and forcing the captain to sail.

Of the 57 bodies recovered so far, 11 remain unidentified, while 67 passengers survived and 13 are missing, Hassan told a news conference.

Other victims included five Pakistanis, four South Africans, three Filipinos, two Singaporeans, one Irish and one German, he said, adding that there was one American survivor.

The foreign ministry in Singapore gave a higher toll, saying that the bodies of four Singaporeans had been recovered and two other people from the Southeast Asian city-state were rescued.

In Johannesburg the company employing some of the victims of the disaster said that five South Africans had died.

Four were employees of Murray and Roberts engineering firm and the fifth victim was a spouse, chief executive Brian Bruce said.

Murray and Roberts and its partner Bahraini firm Nass hired the boat to celebrate completing the shell of a $150-million World Trade Center being built in Manama.

The Indian ambassador said that the passengers had been working for a consortium building the twin tower, which is planned to become the tallest structure in the Bahraini capital.

"It was a dinner cruise to celebrate the completion of the concrete structure. Unfortunately it turned into a nightmare," Shetty said.

Bahraini officials said that passengers of 16 nationalities were on board, but there were no children among the victims.

Abdullah Al Qubaisi, from the Al Dana company that owned the vessel, blamed the disaster on overloading, telling state television that it was allowed to carry only 100 passengers.

He said that the boat was rented to a local company called Island Tours that arranged the cruise.

"They loaded the boat with more than its capacity. The captain refused to sail but they forced him to leave," Qubaisi said.

He said that the captain and two assistants who survived reported that the two-level 100-meter (328-foot) long boat capsized when too many passengers gathered at one end.

The US Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, helped in the rescue effort.

Commander Jeff Breslau said that 16 navy divers, a rescue boat and a helicopter took part in the operations overnight until Bahraini authorities informed the US Navy that they were able to carry on the work on their own.

Bahraini officials, who ruled out terrorism as a cause of the disaster, set up a commission to probe the incident and said that the captain, a non-Bahraini whose nationality was not immediately revealed, was being questioned.

No distress call came from the boat before it sank, said coast guard chief Youssef Al Ghatim.

The boat's owner did not make clear if the vessel was insured, according to a local newspaper. But the head of Bahrain's insurance society said that traditional boats such as the one involved in the disaster are not usually covered by insurance firms.

The accident happened at about 9:45 pm (1845 GMT) about a mile south of the Sheikh Khalifa Bin Salman bridge, which links the capital Manama with the smaller Muharraq island.

Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa was shown on television comforting distraught survivors brought to the Muharraq base.

Bahrain is an archipelago of 35 islands ruled by the Sunni Muslim Khalifa dynasty. It has a population of 650,000, of whom 450,000 are Bahrainis.

The small kingdom is the leading banking center in the Gulf, and the main base of Islamic banking in the region.