DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The death toll from Cyclone Shaheen reached five people on Monday and several Iranian fishermen remained missing as the storm moved farther ashore in Oman and weakened.
Authorities in Oman said they had located the body of a man who had disappeared when the waters washed him away from his vehicle. When the storm made landfall on Sunday, a similarly drowned child and two Asian foreign nationals were reported killed in a landslide.
Rescuers in Iran found the body of one of the five missing fishermen in the waters of Pasabandar, a fishing village near the border with Pakistan, state television reported. Iranian parliament deputy speaker Ali Nikzad said Sunday that up to six fishermen were feared to have been killed by the cyclone.
Shaheen’s winds were reaching 90 kilometers (55 miles) per hour and would continue to weaken, according to the India Meteorological Department, the benchmark institution for cyclones in the Indian Ocean. Experts expected the storm to weaken to a tropical depression in the next few hours. Shaheen made landfall with winds of up to 93 miles (150 kilometers) per hour.
Omani state television broadcast images of roads and valleys flooded by the storm over the sultanate. The extremes of the meteor also affected the neighboring United Arab Emirates where Abu Dhabi and Dubai are located. Emirates had warned of the storm to its population and on Sunday it registered gales, which affected the newly opened venue of Expo 2020 in Dubai.
A cyclone is the same as a hurricane or typhoon, names that change only according to their location. Hurricanes occur to the east of the international date line, and typhoons to the west. These storms are known as cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Australia.
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Associated Press journalist Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran contributed to this report.
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