Ferry tragedy is a mystery
2006-02-04 21:48
Cairo - Survivor accounts and expert analyses have raised several unresolved questions about the circumstances of the sinking of an Egyptian ferry on Friday, which has left 1 000 people dead or missing.
Search and rescue operations are continuing more than a day after the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 sunk in the Red Sea after sailing from the port of Duba in Saudi Arabia.
Angry survivors have blamed the captain for refusing to turn around when a fire broke out in one of the engines, just after the ship departed Duba.
According to passengers, the crew repeatedly assured them they could extinguish the blaze, but they failed and the ship went down.
A senior Egyptian transport ministry official has said the ship did turn around after a first fire broke out. It then made a second U-turn when crew appeared to have quelled the blaze.
He said it was then that a second fire went off.
'The ship was ill-equipped'
Other sources have spoken of a fire breaking out in the ship's exhaust system and in a truck on the car deck.
Surviving passengers have also said the ship was ill-equipped because there were not enough lifeboats and life jackets for everybody.
However Mahmud al-Harbi, head of Duba port, told the Al-Arabiya television network the ship had successfully passed international safety tests a day earlier.
Some survivors have accused the captain of being the first to board a lifeboat. They also say the crew organised their own evacuation before helping the passengers.
The captain is unaccounted for, but hospital officials say 40 crew members are among the 200-odd survivors safely brought back to the shore.
A distress signal was picked up in Scotland as the ship sank, but reports suggest officials only started worrying about the ship's fate three hours later - when it was running several hours late on its expected arrival time.
The news that the ship had sunk emerged seven hours later.
Several sources have expressed shock over the speed at which the ship sank.
'Where are the corpses?'
According to experts, the extra decks added a few years ago to increase the 36-year-old ship's capacity could affect its stability in rough sea conditions.
The specialised publication, Lloyds List, says the ship's inability to comply with the latest upgrade of safety standards drove it out of its original Mediterranean trading route.
On Friday, an Egyptian police official said at least 185 bodies had been pulled out of the sea but hospital sources in Safaga and Hurghada, further north, said only a few corpses had been brought to the morgues, more than 36 hours after the tragedy.
No official could offer any confirmation of the death toll on Saturday.