JEDDAH/CAIRO, 5 February 2006 — Survivors of a Red Sea ferry that went down early Friday with close to 1,400 people said the captain of the ship abandoned them to their fate and was among the first group of people to take to a lifeboat. They also said that a fire erupted soon after the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 left the Saudi port of Duba Thursday night and burned for hours, causing the ship to list and probably sink.
By sundown yesterday, Egyptian and Saudi rescue boats had picked up a total of 406 survivors from the sea, but almost 1,000 other passengers and crew on the ship are feared to have drowned, leading to angry scenes outside Safaga port as relatives demanded information from the authorities.
Among the survivors were 28 men picked up by Saudi Coast Guard, according to Capt. Muhammad Al-Harbi, director general of Duba port. They included 25 Egyptians and three Saudis rescued from waters almost 18 nautical miles (33 km) beyond Saudi territorial waters, said Al-Harbi. In all, 36 Saudi passengers have been rescued.
Al-Harbi said passengers rescued by the coast guard were first brought to Duba port and then transported to King Khaled Hospital in Tabuk.
The Interior Ministry named 24 of the Saudi survivors as: Ibrahim Al-Qahtani, Muhammad Al-Qahtani, Ahmed Al-Qahtani, Saad Al-Dossari, Saleh Abunuwair, Talal Al-Sufyani, Fahd Al-Otaibi, Muhammad Al-Maawi, Mishaal Al-Otaibi, Yasser Al-Nafeie, Ala Naqadi, Saud Al-Nafeie, Nasser Al-Baqami, Nasser Abdul Ghalib Al-Baqami, Nasser Al-Andas, Atallah Al-Atallah, Abdullah Al-Sulaiman, Hala Al-Hawas, Muna Al-Nazouri, Ala Jawa, Fahd Al-Rubaie, Deena Al-Samadani, Muhammad Shaman and Wala Naqadi.
On the Egyptian side, the survivors were sent to three hospitals — Safaga Central, Hurghada General and Hurghada Military. Over 100 physicians and nearly 60 ambulances were brought in from a number of Egyptian Governorates to deal with the emergency.
Survivors said the ship began listing shortly after leaving Duba and that a fire “burned for hours” in the engine room.
“Two hours after our departure from Duba, thick smoke started to come out of the engines,” 34-year-old Egyptian Raafat Al-Sayyed said.
“There was thick smoke,” Rifat Said, from Giza, said. “We asked why and they told us they were putting out the fire but it got worse. The ferry sailed on for two hours listing to the side. Then it just went onto its side and within five minutes it had sunk.”
Another Egyptian, Kamel Mohammad Abdel Askari, added: “But the fire continued for a long time, and they (the crew) kept on saying that they were getting it under control.” Some claimed Duba was still on the horizon when the fire started, but the ship sailed on.
A passenger described the fire as “small” and said there was no explosion on board. He said the crew told passengers to go up onto the bridge so they could extinguish the blaze as the ship started to list dangerously. “Everything happened very quickly. In less than 10 minutes the ship went upside down and we were in the water,” he added.
Egyptian survivor Shahata Ali said the passengers had told the captain about the fire but he told them not to worry. “We were wearing lifejackets but they told us there was nothing wrong, told us to take them off and they took away the lifejackets. Then the boat started to sink and the captain took a boat and left,” he added.
“The captain was the first to leave and we were surprised to see the boat sinking,” added Khaled Hassan, another survivor. Other survivors told similar stories.
The ship was modified in the 1980s, with two extra passenger decks placed on the top of the vessel. As a result, says David Osler from the London shipping paper Lloyds List, the ferry had an “unusually high profile”, sitting much taller in the water than it was originally designed to do. The extra weight of passengers concentrated on the bridge or upper decks would have further destabilized the vessel. There were strong winds on the night of the disaster that could have been a factor in the sinking.
President Hosni Mubarak flew to the port of Hurghada and visited survivors in two hospitals. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah sent a message to Mubarak expressing his condolences on the deaths. Mubarak thanked the Kingdom for its support in the rescue operation.
Shaaban El-Qott, 55, from Qena, was looking for his cousin who works in Kuwait. He had been waiting at the port since Friday morning and spent the night on the street. “No one is telling us anything. All I want to know if he’s dead or alive,” Qott shouted to a reporter.
A group of nearly 140 survivors came ashore at Hurghada shortly before dawn. Wrapped in blankets, they walked down a rescue ship’s ramp, some of them barefoot and shivering, and boarded buses for a local hospital. Several were on stretchers.
Survivor Abdul Wahab, a martial arts instructor, said he spent 20 hours in the sea, sometimes holding on to a barrel from the ship and later taking a lifejacket from a dead body.
Ahmed Elew, an Egyptian in his 20s, said he went to the ship’s crew to report the fire and they ordered him to help put it out. When the ship began sinking, Elew said he jumped into the water and swam for several hours. He said he saw one overloaded lifeboat capsize, but managed to stay afloat long enough to find another. “Around me people were dying and sinking,” he said. “Who is responsible for this? Somebody did not do their job right. These people must be held accountable.”
— Additional input from agencies
