Two survivors see ferry sink

2004-03-12 18:04

Paris - A passenger ferry from the Comoro Islands with 120 passengers and crew on board sank off the coast of Madagascar during a violent storm last weekend, the French foreign ministry said on Friday.

"After searches lasting several days, we confirm that the Samson ferry sank with at least 120 passengers, including two French nationals," foreign ministry spokesperson Herve Ladsous said.

The Samson had set sail from the Comoros, which lie northwest of Madagascar, on Saturday night, bound for the northwest Madagascar port of Mahajanga.

According to the ship's manifest, there were 120 people on board, most of them Comorans but also 35 Madagascans and two Frenchwomen.

A spokesperson for French rescue services on nearby Reunion Island, Dominique Bucas, said the captain of the ferry had radioed on Sunday when the Samson was seven hours away from Mahajanga to report that the ship's generator had broken down and he intended to return to the Comoros.

A French Transall military aircraft had left Reunion Island on Wednesday and patrolled the area off northwestern Madagascar where the ferry was last heard from.

Two Comorans who were on the ferry and managed to make it to shore, clinging to the plastic shell of a life raft, said they had seen the boat sink.

Ladsous also said that France will send additional relief supplies to isolated villages in northeastern Madagascar from Reunion on Friday.

Madagascar's northeastern vanilla-growing region was the hardest hit by the cyclone, which battered the north of the island last weekend, killing at least 50 people on land.

The storm then blew out into the Mozambique Channel, where it remained stationary for two days, before heeling around and crossing back across southern Madagascar, from west to east, before blowing out to sea on Thursday.

- AFP