180 survivors so far as Red Sea search continues
An Egyptian passenger ferry carrying around 1,300 people, mostly Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, sank in the Red Sea overnight.
Coast Guard vessels pulled dozens of bodies from the water today, and at least 180 survivors escaped on lifeboats.
Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene this afternoon, about 10 hours after the ferry went down. British naval officials initially diverted a warship to the scene but later abandon its rescue efforts, a defence spokesman said in London, declining to explain why.
Egyptian authorities turned down a US offer to divert a P3-Orion maritime naval patrol aircraft to the area.
Saudi ships were patrolling waters off their shore to hunt for survivors, but found none, a senior Saudi security official said.
The 35-year-old ship, Al-Salam Boccaccio 98, went down 40 miles off the Egyptian port of Hurghada between midnight and 2am as most of the passengers were sleeping.
They plunged into waters with temperatures around 19 Celsius.
An official at the maritime authority control room in Suez said at least 20 bodies had been pulled from the water.
A spokesman for the Egyptian Embassy in London, Ayman al-Kaffas, told The Associated Press that “dozens of bodies” had been pulled out of the water.
The Suez official said 30 survivors had been plucked out of the water and that around 150 more were still known to be on lifeboats.
But as darkness came, there were concerns the death toll could be high.
Any survivors still in the water could go into shock as temperatures in fell in the already cold waters, he said.
The cause was not immediately known, but there were high winds and a sandstorm overnight on Saudi Arabia’s west coast.
Hundreds of relatives of the passengers complained bitterly about lack of information as they waited in the Egyptian port of Safaga, where the ship had been scheduled to dock at 3am today.
“There is nobody ... to tell us what is going on,” said Ahmed Abdul Hamid, a teacher from the southern Egyptian city of Assuit who was waiting for his cousin. “We are in a complete blackout.”
“How can they put all these passengers in such an old ship that was not fit for sailing?” he asked, adding “somebody should be blamed.”
The ship left at 7pm local time last night from the Saudi port of Duba, a common transit point for tens of thousands of Egyptian expatriates working in Saudi Arabia – many of them impoverished – to return home.
The boat was destined for Safaga, a port 120 miles across the Red Sea.
After arriving in Safaga, workers would continue on to their homes, mostly in southern Egypt.
The agent for the ship in Saudi Arabia, Farid al-Douadi, said about 220 vehicles were on board and that the vessel had the capacity for 2,500 passengers.
It was carrying 1,318 people, including a crew of 96, the head of the Egyptian Maritime Authority, Mahfouz Taha Marzouk, told The Associated Press.
“The ship complied with all necessary safety measures,” Egyptian Transport Minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour told Egypt’s Middle East News Agency.
“The reasons (for sinking) remain unknown.”
The passengers included about 1,200 Egyptians, as well as 99 Saudis, three Syrians, two Sudanese, and a Canadian, the control room official said.
Among the passengers were likely Muslim pilgrims who had overstayed their visas after last month’s hajj pilgrimage to work in the kingdom.
It was not immediately possible to explain why the numbers of passengers provided by the control room exceeded the figure provided by Marzouk.
No distress signal was received from the ferry, but at some point during the night it disappeared from radar screens, the control room official said.
Marzouk said the ship was built in 1971 and renovated in 1990 in an Egyptian shipyard.
While the ship’s owners and the maritime authority referred to the ship as “Salaam 98,” Osler said its registered name was Al-Salam Boccaccio 98.
Duba and Safaga lie virtually opposite each other at the northern end of the Red Sea, which is an extremely busy sea route, with east-west traffic between Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well north-south traffic through the Suez Canal and to and from the Israeli and Jordanian ports of Eilat and Aqaba.
The ship is owned by the Egyptian firm El-Salaam Maritime Transport Co.
The company’s owner, Mamdouh Ismail, said the ship is registered in Panama. He spoke before the sinking was confirmed and refused to comment further.
A ship owned by the same company, also carrying pilgrims, collided with a cargo ship at the southern entrance to the Suez Canal in October, causing a stampede among passengers trying to escape the sinking ship.
Two people were killed and 40 injured.
