MANAMA, 1 April 2006 — Fifty-seven people were killed while 13 others remain missing following the capsizing of a boat Thursday night off the Bahraini coast of Muharraq.
The dead include 17 Indians, 14 British, four South Africans, four Pakistanis, three Filipinos, two Singaporean men, an Irish man, and a German woman.
Eleven other bodies recovered remain unidentified, all of them women.
“All but two of the bodies of those killed in the accident were recovered from inside the dhow,” said Bahrain Coast Guard chief Col. Yussef Al-Ghatim.
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah called Bahrain’s King Hamad yesterday to convey his condolences over the deaths caused by the boat tragedy.
Sources said that those killed had been trapped inside the dhow after it capsized while traveling in wind conditions of 10 to 15 knots.
Efforts to locate the remaining 13 missing persons continued yesterday as coast guard and helicopters searched the area surrounding the accident scene in hope of finding survivors.
Sixty-seven people, from sixteen nationalities including Americans, Polish, Egyptians and Thai, were among those rescued after the two-story tourist dhow capsized during an evening cruise party organized by a local construction company for its employees
Thirty-three of those rescued needed to be transported to local hospitals for treatment, according to the head of emergency services at Salmaniya Medical Complex. All but two were treated and released.
A coast guard station in Muharraq, only a short distance from where the dhow capsized, was turned into a command center to run the search-and-rescue operation and receive those injured and killed.
Assets from the US Fifth Fleet were also immediately deployed to assist with the rescue efforts, including coast guard vessels, helicopters and 16 divers who were placed on standby. The incident had occurred approximately one mile east of the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain. Bahraini officials refused to jump to conclusions regarding the cause of the accident, opting to wait for the results of the joint investigation committee, which had been set up shortly following the accident with the Public Prosecutor office.
Media reports said the vessel was overloaded, but Ministry of Interior spokesman Col. Tariq Al-Hassan declined to attribute the cause of the accident to overcrowding or the weather conditions
“It’s too early to determine what caused the dhow to capsize. Only the investigation committee will be able to determine the cause,” he told a press conference yesterday.
He added that the dhow captain, who is not a Bahraini, was under investigation, but had not been placed under arrest.
Al-Ghatim pointed out that the prevailing weather conditions at the time would not have had a big impact on the dhow operation.
The dhow owner, who inaugurated its operations on March 10, had confirmed that 137 passengers were on board the boat when it left the Marina docks in Manama at around 8.15 p.m. Coast guard records state that the vessel listed at about 9.45 p.m. Unconfirmed reports say that the vessel was designed to hold no more than 100 passengers, but Bahraini officials would not confirm this information.
Passengers of another dhow traveling behind it also witnessed the horror of the celebratory dinner that turned tragic.
