Bodies floating on the water
2006-02-03 16:18
Cairo - A ferry carrying 1 300 passengers sank in Red Sea overnight on a trip from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, search and rescue teams picked up dozens of dead bodies from the water, said official sources on Friday.
They said that some survivors were also brought ashore at the Egyptian port of Safaga, where the ferry had been scheduled to arrive at 02:00 on Friday.
One official said that a search and rescue plane spotted a lifeboat near where the 11 800-tonne Al Salam 98 last had contact with shore about 22:00 on Thursday evening.
Some earlier reports called the ferry the Al Salam 89, but a company official said that was a different vessel also owned by the el-Salam Maritime Transport Company.
Annual pilgrimage
A police source at the port of Safaga said: "Dozens of bodies were picked up from the sea ... they were from the ferry." Other sources said Egyptian aircraft also saw bodies floating in the water.
They said most of the passengers were Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia, but at this time of year many Egyptians were still on their way home from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
The reports quoted official sources in Safaga as saying the ferry had sunk 92km from the Egyptian port of Hurghada, north of Safaga. It added: "Some of the passengers survived."
The ferry was on a trip between the Saudi port of Duba and Safaga, both at the northern end of Red Sea. It had originally come from Jeddah, the main port for the pilgrimage.
Adel Shukri, the head of administration at the shipping company, which was based in Cairo, said coastal stations didn't receive any SOS message from the crew.
Heavy winds, rain
He said the weather had been very poor overnight on the Saudi side of Red Sea, with heavy winds and rain. But, visibility should have been good out at sea.
Another company official, Andrea Odone, said he could not confirm that the ship had sunk or that there were any survivors. Odone said: "It could take some hours to work out what happened."
Transport minister Mohamed Lutfi Mansour said the armed forces had deployed four rescue vessels at the scene.
A Saudi border control official in Jeddah said: "We don't know yet what happened - if it sank, or overturned, or what."
A sister ship, the Al Salam 95, sank in Red Sea in October after a collision with a Cypriot commercial vessel. In that case almost all of the passengers were rescued.
In December 1991, 464 people were killed after the Salem Express hit coral outside the Red Sea port of Safaga, 600km southeast of Cairo.