MBAO, Senegal, Sept 26, 2008 (AFP) - Relatives of some of the 1,800 people drowned in Africa's worst maritime disaster gathered Friday on the sixth anniversary of the tragedy amid continuing anger and a diplomatic spat.

Some 80 mourners assembled in teeming rain in the small 'cemetery of the drowned' on the outskirts of Dakar for a sombre Muslim and Christian remembrance ceremony.

The ferry Joola capsized in stormy seas off Gambia on the night of September 26, 2002 while sailing between the southern Senegalese territory of Casamance and the capital Dakar.

Licensed to carry 550 people, it had 1,927 passengers on board, according to official figures, of whom only 64 survived.

Only 500 bodies were recovered and a handful of those identified. The remainder lie in mass graves in the sandy cemetery close to the main road to Dakar.

Mourners prayed over each row of graves Friday, hoping that one of them contained the remains of their loved ones.

'It is a symbolic act, we tell ourselves maybe my family members are resting here,' Abdou Ndoye, who lost his brother-in-law, some cousins and nephews in the disaster, told AFP.

This year the commemoration comes amid a legal battle heating up between Senegal and France over responsibility for the sinking of the Joola, which was carrying 22 French nationals.

'By God's grace this affair resurfaced when the whole world wanted to bury it,' Idrissa Diallo, a spokesman for the Senegalese victims' association, said during the short ceremony.

On Thursday, the Senegalese authorities announced they had issued an arrest warrant against a French judge, who had ordered international arrest warrants for Senegalese officials in connection with the Joola disaster.

In 2003, a year after the sinking, Senegal ruled out further prosecutions despite the fact that the ferry was grossly overloaded and manned by a navy crew.

The same year a French court opened an investigation into the disaster after the families of the French victims brought legal action against the Senegalese authorities for manslaughter and failing to help people in danger.

In Mbao relatives of the victims said they pinned their hope in the French judge, Jean-Wilfrid Noel, to finally obtain some answers and action.

'When I look at the sea or a ship .. it is hard for me,' Ndaye Drame Diallo, a mother who lost three of her sons in the tragedy, said. 'Without justice, we cannot mourn.'

After the accident, several ministers and high-ranking military officers were fired and compensation offered to the families but the case never came before a court.

'We want to know the truth, and if that cannot be done in a Senegalese court then it will have to be done elsewhere', Abdou Ndoye said.

At another official commemoration ceremony at Dakar's Place de Souvenir, which looks on the sea, the families of the victims called for a special memmorial museum to be built.

'We need to create a Joola memmorial museum to help Senegal face its history,' Nassardine Aidara, who coordinates the families' efforts to get a monument built, said.

Many see the Senegalese state's apparant reluctance to begin construction on a special monument as another sign that it does not want to take any responsibility for the tragedy.

The Joola was carrying people from across Senegal, including school students and artists, as well as citizens from Belgium, Cameroon, France, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Lebanon, Niger, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.

The official death toll of 1,863 was 300 more than the number lost in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but other sources put the number at 1,953 at least.