SAFAGA, Egypt – Spotlights probed the inky darkness as rescue boats mounted an increasingly desperate search for hundreds of people feared dead in chilly Red Sea waters a day after the sinking of the aging ferry Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98.
Of the 1,400 aboard – mainly Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia – only 324 had been rescued by Friday night, plucked from inflatable lifeboats dropped by helicopters or pulled directly from the water in life jackets.
Passengers said fire broke out on the ship early in its trip. Transportation Minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour said early today that the fire was “small” and that investigators were working to determine whether it was linked to the sinking. He said there was no explosion on the vessel.
At the Egyptian port of Hurghada, nearly 140 survivors arrived today – the first significant group to come to shore. They walked off the ship down a ramp, some of them barefoot and shivering, wrapped in blankets, and immediately boarded buses to a hospital.
Many said the fire began 1 1/2 hours to 21/2 hours after the ship’s departure, but that it kept going and burned for hours.
“The fire happened about an hour or 90 minutes into the trip, but they decided to keep going. It’s negligence,” one survivor, Nabil Zikry, said before he was moved along by police, who tried to keep the survivors from talking to journalists.
Ahmed Elew, an Egyptian in his 20s, said he reported the fire to the ship’s crew and they told him to help with the water hoses to put it out. At one point, there was an explosion, he said.
When the ship began sinking, Elew said he jumped into the water and swam for several hours. He said he saw one overloaded lifeboat overturn. He eventually got into another lifeboat. “Around me, people were dying and sinking,” he said.
“Who is responsible for this?” he asked. “Somebody did not do their job right.”
Several of the survivors shouted their anger that the rescue had taken so long.
“They left us in the water for 24 hours. A helicopter came above us and circled, we would signal, and they ignored us,” one man shouted. “Our lives are the cheapest in the world,” another said.
A spokesman for President Hosni Mubarak said the ferry did not have enough lifeboats, and questions were raised about the safety of the 35-year-old, refitted ship, which was weighed down with 220 cars as well as the passengers.
Officials said more than 185 bodies were recovered, while hundreds remained missing in the dark, choppy sea nearly 24 hours after the ship went down. One lifeboat was spotted from a helicopter during the day bobbing in the waves with what appeared to be about a dozen or more passengers.
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