Series of Tragic Errors Doomed Egypt Ferry

By MARIAM FAM
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAFAGA, Egypt (AP) - fire starts 20 miles out of port

0204dv-ferry-update The series of tragic errors that apparently claimed more than 1,000 lives on an Egyptian ferry escalated when the crew decided to push across the Red Sea despite the fire burning in the aging vessel's parking bay, survivors said Saturday.

The Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98 had sailed only about 20 miles from the Saudi shore, but its crew instead tried to reach Egypt's shores 110 miles away. Only 376 survivors had been rescued by late Saturday.

"We told the crew, 'Let's turn back, let's call for help,' but they refused and said everything was under control," said passenger Ahmed Abdel Wahab, 30, an Egyptian who works in Saudi Arabia.

Passengers began panicking, and crew members locked up some women in their cabins, Wahab and another survivor said, though many others being treated in Safaga hospitals Saturday said that was not true.

Explosion

As the blaze grew out of control, passengers not locked in their rooms moved to one side of the 35-year-old vessel. An explosion was heard, and high winds helped push the unbalanced ship over. The ship quickly sank with more than 1,400 passengers and crew and 220 cars aboard.

News reports on Saturday said the ship's captain and some of the crew fled their drowning vessel in one of the first lifeboats to launch.

Despite the fire, the ship had managed to get within about 55 miles of the Egyptian port of Hurghada, according to official accounts.

At the port of Safaga - the ship's original destination - relatives and friends of passengers begged authorities for information. When there was none, some banged on the iron gates trying to storm the docks.

Riot police with truncheons pushed the frantic crowd away from the port compound. Angry relatives threw stones, and some police could be seen hurling them back.

Shaaban el-Qott, 55, from Qena, Egypt, was looking for his cousin. 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. We rely on God. May God destroy Hosni Mubarak!" el-Qott shouted to a reporter Saturday, referring to the Egyptian president. "This government was supposed to throw this ship away and get a new one."

The rescue effort got off to a slow start. Initial offers of help were rejected, and two days after the ship set sail from Dubah, Saudi Arabia, just 376 survivors had been found. The ship's captain was reported missing.

Egyptian officials initially rejected a British offer to divert a warship to the scene and a U.S. offer to send a P3-Orion maritime naval patrol aircraft. Egypt reversed itself, but in the end only the Orion - which can search underwater from the air - was sent.

Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene Friday afternoon, about 10 hours after the ferry was believed to have capsized.

Many survivors complained that crew members discouraged them from putting on life jackets and said they did nothing to put lifeboats in service when it became obvious the ship would sink.

"It was like watching the movie Titanic," said Sayed Abdul Hakim, a 32-year-old painter who worked in Kuwait. "None of the crew brought down life boats or even told us how to use them. I swam for three hours. Then I spotted a rubber boat and I climbed in. I stayed there for 18 hours. I felt I was a dead man."

Another survivor, Nabil Taghyan, 27, said he saw the captain and crew flee in lifeboats.

"The captain took the first speed boat, even though he should go last," Taghyan told The New York Times, according to its online edition Saturday.

The tragedy struck a deep core of discontent among Egyptians, who are suffering from a considerable economic downturn and increased unemployment.

"Had the government made any job opportunities available at home, these people wouldn't have been forced to go abroad in the first place," said Moustafa Zayed, 24, whose father worked as a contractor in Saudi Arabia and was on the ship. "Had he stayed (in Egypt) we wouldn't have had money to buy food."

Tens of thousands of Egyptians work in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries - many of them from impoverished families in southern Egypt who spend years abroad to earn money. They often travel by ship to and from Saudi Arabia.

Some on board the ferry were believed to be Muslim pilgrims who had overstayed their visas after last month's hajj pilgrimage to work in the kingdom.

Mubarak flew to Hurghada, about 40 miles farther north, on Saturday and visited survivors in two hospitals. Television pictures of the visit, which normally would have carried sound of Mubarak's conversations, were silent.

During the visit, Mubarak ordered that the families of each victim be paid $5,200 in compensation and the survivors $2,600 each.

In a televised address, the president said, "We pray that God almighty may count (the victims) among his martyrs."

A group of nearly 140 survivors came ashore at Hurghada shortly before dawn Saturday. Wrapped in blankets, they walked down a rescue ship's ramp, some of them barefoot and shivering, and boarded buses for a hospital.

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. 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 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."

Mubarak spokesman Suleiman Awad said the ferry did not have enough lifeboats and an investigation was under way into the ship's seaworthiness. But later, Maj. Gen. Sherin Hasan, chairman of the maritime section of the Transportation Ministry, said there were more than enough lifeboats for the number of passengers on the ferry.

Hasan said the captain of the vessel, whom he did not name, was missing.

Mahfouz Taha, head of Egyptian Red Sea Ports authority in Safaga, reported that 376 people were saved. He confirmed the fire started in the parking bay of the vessel.

The ship left Dubah at 7:30 p.m. Thursday on the 120-mile trip to Safaga, where it was scheduled to arrive at 3 a.m. It disappeared from radar screens between midnight and 2 a.m., and no distress signal was received.

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On the Net:

SOS

By Jonathan Wright Cairo - Fourteen bodies and 12 survivors were recovered on Friday from the Red Sea after a ferry heading from Saudi Arabia to Egypt with an estimated 1 400 people on board sank, maritime sources said. A search and rescue plane spotted a lifeboat near where the 6 600-ton Al Salam 89 last had contact with shore at about 10pm (20h00 GMT) on Thursday evening, one official said. Rescue boats brought some survivors to Safaga, where the ferry was meant to arrive on Friday morning, one security official said. Coastal stations did not receive any SOS message from the crew But Egyptian aircraft also saw bodies floating in the water, security sources said. Most of the passengers were Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia, officials said, but at this time of year many Egyptians are still on their way home from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The Egyptian state news agency MENA quoted official sources in Safaga as saying the ferry had sunk 92km from the Egyptian port of Hurghada, north of Safaga. "Some of the passengers survived," it added. The ferry was on an overnight trip between the Saudi port of Duba and Safaga, both at the northern end of the Red Sea. It had originally come from Jeddah, the main port for the pilgrimage. "We don't know yet what happened, if it sank, or overturned, or what." Coastal stations did not receive any SOS message from the crew, said Adel Shukri, the head of administration at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owns the ferry. Another company official, Andrea Odone, said he could not confirm that the ship had sunk or that there were any survivors. "It could take some hours to work out what happened," Odone told Reuters from the company headquarters in Cairo. Transport Minister Mohamed Lutfi Mansour told MENA the armed forced had deployed four rescue vessels at the scene. A Saudi border control official in Jeddah said: "We don't know yet what happened, if it sank, or overturned, or what." According to the company's Web site, the Al Salam 89 can carry about 1 400 passengers. Egyptian officials and media called it the Al Salam 98 but the company's Web site names it as the Al Salam 89. A sister ship, the Al Salam 95, sank in the Red Sea in October after a collision with a Cypriot commercial vessel. In that case almost all of the passengers were rescued. - Sapa-AFP and Reuters

Here isSurvivors Say Egyptian Ferry Was on Fire Before Sinking
Captain Reportedly Refused to Return to Port

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 5, 2006; Page A16
 

HURGHADA, Egypt, Feb. 4 -- The smell of oily smoke reached the passenger deck of the Alsalam Boccaccio 98, and engineering student Isra Ibrahim Abdul-Rahman asked the crew what was amiss. Crew members said it was just a little fire down below. We're taking care of it, they said. Later, there was more smoke, more questions, more reassurances. Finally, around 1 a.m. Friday, black smoke billowed from the ferry's vehicle deck and the Boccaccio 98 began to list to the right. Desperately, the crew and captain ordered passengers to gather on the left.

In a matter of minutes, the ship sank in the Red Sea. Passengers and crew -- about 1,400 people, in all, officials said -- threw themselves overboard and scrambled to find rubber dinghies drifting in the roiling waters. None of the 10 larger lifeboats, each of which could hold 100 people, was lowered into the water.


"The crew and captain never said abandon ship. They kept reassuring us until the end. By then, it was every passenger for himself," said Abdul-Rahman, who was convalescing here Saturday from a harrowing night at sea.

Abdul-Rahman was one of about 400 survivors. About 200 bodies have been retrieved from the sea. Another 800 people are missing and probably dead, Egyptian authorities said. At least 20 of the passengers were children.

It was a preventable disaster, survivors said Saturday. Passengers and crew members interviewed at Hurghada General Hospital, which overlooks the sea, said that the fire and efforts to put it out eventually caused the sinking but that there had been plenty of time to turn back before the ship went down.

Flames broke out less than two hours after the ferry, a 35-year-old vessel owned by El Salam Maritime Transport Co., had set out from the Saudi port of Duba. The captain insisted on heading west toward his destination on Egypt's shore, Safaga. For several hours, the ship continued to sail as fires flared repeatedly. Within 60 miles of the Egyptian coast, it sank.

"If we had only gone back to Saudi Arabia," said Abdul Rahman, 17, with a sigh as she huddled under a hospital blanket. She was returning to Egypt from a visit to her father, who works, like thousands of Egyptians, in oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia.

"The captain's word is law," said Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed, a maintenance crew member who was told to help put out the flames. The captain, identified by Ahmed and others as Sayyed Omar, was seen jumping overboard as the Boccaccio 98 listed.

Survivors Say Egyptian Ferry Was on Fire Before Sinking
During the ordeal, survivors said, no one received instructions for inflating the rubber life rafts, which hold about 25 passengers and were contained in buoyant barrels. Egyptian rescuers took up to 18 hours to pick up some of the survivors. The sinking was not announced until 12 hours after the ship had lost contact with land.

Ahmed, the maintenance crewman, said he fought fire with sea water pumped into the ship through hoses. The fire would go out and revive, Ahmed said. "We couldn't figure out the cause," he added in a low murmur.

Surviving passengers and crew members of an Egyptian ferry that sank in the Red Sea said that the ship was on fire for around three hours before it went down and that the captain refused to turn back to a Saudi port it had left only an hour before the blaze erupted.

The long battle against inextinguishable flames had a fatal consequence, Ahmed concluded: "The water wasn't draining. Pumps weren't working right."

Tamer Fikreh Hakim, a ship restaurant worker, said: "Drains were blocked by cargo. The ship was filling up."

In effect, the pair said, the Boccaccio 98 sank itself.

As smoke grew heavier, passengers milled on the upper deck, and some quarreled with crew members about whether to don life jackets. "Some crew said, just relax, go to your room," said Shabaan Ragat Shabaan, a driver who worked in Saudi Arabia during the annual Islamic pilgrimage season and was on his way home to Alexandria.

Eventually, most people put on vests, added Ashraf Sayyed Mohamed, another driver. "They couldn't stop us," he said. "People began to panic."

As smoke began to visibly pour from the rear of the ship, "everyone was running around asking what to do. The captain said nothing. The crew, though, they began to put on life jackets, too," Mohamed said.

"We're not foolish," said Abdul-Rahman. "All the people rushed to the deck and begged the captain to turn back. He refused. He contacted no one. He was crazy!"

When the ship rolled to the right, people began to shout, "It's tilting, it's tilting," witnesses said. "We of the crew know that if the ship leans 20 degrees, it's finished. It took only a few minutes. The captain told everyone to go to port side, but it meant nothing," said Hakim, the waiter.

Then passengers tumbled into the Red Sea.

Abdul-Rahman, wearing the black robes of pious Muslim women, bobbed in her life vest until she spotted a dinghy. "Some of the people knew how to inflate them. You know, pulling a strap and all that," she said.

The drivers Shabaan and Mohamed, who are both 36, swam to a raft inflated by a crew member. They saw one lifeboat afloat upside down; desperate passengers tried to turn it over. They failed. "I began to see some bodies face down," said Shabaan.

Hakim clung to a railing as the ship went down, waiting for the water to rise closer before leaping into the sea. People who were sliding off grabbed his legs and scratched his face. "They were pulling me. I held on and asked God for strength," he said in the hospital, his cheeks and knees marked with abrasions.

In the water, he joined Ahmed, 32, the maintenance crewman, and more than 20 others aboard a dinghy. They were soon overwhelmed by 30 more people, and the dinghy began to sink. Fikreh Hakim, 29, said "the passengers were up to their necks in water" when he spied a floating barrel, swam to it and inflated another raft.

Abdul-Rahman said she saw a ship pass close enough to help not long after the sinking. "But it didn't stop," she said. "Only God was looking out for me or anyone."

When found, the survivors' rafts were pulled toward Egyptian naval ships and boats sent by El Salam Maritime. Survivors were treated at the hospital in Hurghada, a nearby military hospital and one in Safaga, 30 miles south.

In their ward, the drivers made plans for returning to Saudi Arabia. "What can we do?" Shabaan said. "There's no real money in Egypt." The equivalent of a few dollars lay on a bed stand next to him, drying.

Hakim, who was spitting up phlegm and water, was evidently worried about his reputation. "Tell them," he called across the ward to Ahmed, "that the crew helped the passengers."

A message on El Salam's Web site denied that the captain and top officers escaped by lifeboat and abandoned passengers. The officers "are until this moment missing either dead or alive," the statement said. "None of the lifeboats have been used to evacuate passengers or crew members since the vessel listed and capsized. Only life rafts have been used for the passenger evacuation." Company officials said the search for survivors will go on.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Saturday that he was following the rescue operation closely, the official MENA news agency reported. There was no immediate government explanation for the late announcement of the sinking or for the initial rejection of British and U.S. help. Egyptian officials at first turned down a British offer to divert a warship to the scene and a U.S. Navy offer to send a P-3 Orion maritime patrol plane, wire services reported.

Then Egypt requested both the Orion and the warship be sent, but called off the ship, deciding it was too far away, said Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown of the U.S. 5th Fleet, headquartered in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain.

Mubarak ordered his government to pay about $5,200 in compensation to the family of each of the dead and about half that to each survivor.

At about the same time as the announcement, hundreds of relatives and friends of the missing stormed the port of Safaga in hopes of forcing authorities to provide information. During an all-night vigil, they had only been read a passenger list.

Captain was 'first to leave' sinking ferry

Families' hopes of finding survivors from the disaster were fading last night, with reports that 362 passengers have been rescued but that most of the estimated 1,400 aboard are thought to have perished.

The ship sank in the early hours of Friday morning while carrying passengers and cars between the Saudi port of Dubah and Safaga in Egypt, on the opposite side of the Red Sea.
No SOS

No SOS Survivors said a fire broke out, which escalated out of control and was followed by an explosion. The vessel apparently sank two hours later and no SOS distress signal was received.

Egyptian survivor Shahata Ali said the passengers had told the captain about the fire but he told them not to worry.

Ali said: "We were wearing lifejackets but they told us there was nothing wrong, told us to take them off and they took [them] away. Then the boat started to sink and the captain took a boat and left."

Another survivor, Khaled Hassan, added: "The captain was the first to leave."

An official at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the al-Salam 98, said the captain, named as Sayyed Omar, was still unaccounted for.

Yesterday, relatives desperate for news about the tragedy gathered at Safaga port in Egypt, where the ferry was heading.

But many clashed with riot police at the port gates following the authorities' apparent failure to keep families informed about the disaster and subsequent rescue efforts.

At times the relatives hurled rocks at the police, who retaliated with tear gas.

"No one is telling us anything," said Shaaban el-Qott, from the southern city of Qena, who was furious after waiting all night at the port for news of his cousin. "All I want to know is if he's dead or alive."

Referring to the Egyptian president, el-Qott added: "May God destroy Hosni Mubarak."

A hysterical woman banged on an iron gate to the port, where survivors from the ferry were being brought ashore.

One passenger, Ahmed Abdel Wahab, an Egyptian who works in Saudi Arabia, said: "Fire erupted in the parking bay where the cars were. We told the crew: 'Let's turn back, let's call for help,' but they refused and said everything was under control."

Other terrifying details of the tragedy emerged yesterday with reports that, as passengers began to panic, "crew members locked up some women in their cabins".
Explosion
"After a while, the ship started to list and they couldn't control the fire," said Wahab, who spent 20 hours in the sea, sometimes holding on to a barrel from the ship and later taking a lifejacket from a dead body, before he was hauled on to a rescue boat. "Then we heard an explosion and five minutes later the ship sank," he said.

Yesterday, President Mubar-ak flew to the port of Hurghada, about 40 miles further north and visited survivors in two hospitals.

A group of nearly 140 survivors came ashore there 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.

Many survivors said the fire began about 90 minutes after departure, but the ship kept going. Their accounts varied on the fire's location, with some saying it was in a storeroom or the engine room.

"They decided to keep going. It's negligence," one survivor, Nabil Zikry, said before he was moved along by police, who tried to prevent the survivors from talking to journalists.

"It was like the Titanic on fire," another one shouted.

Rescue efforts appeared to have been confused. Egyptian officials initially turned down a British offer to divert a warship to the scene and a US offer to help. But then Egypt reversed its decision and asked for both countries to send ships to the area.

The ferry had 1,200 Egyptian and 112 other passengers as well as 96 crew members.

Titanic Disaster in the Red Sea
By Cumali Onal, Safaca
Saturday, February 04, 2006
zaman.com


A disaster like one of the world's biggest ferry tragedies, The Titanic, took place in the Red Sea yesterday. A cruise ship carrying 1,272 passengers and 96 crew members en route to Egypt from Saudi Arabia's Duba, sank in the Red Sea.

Most of the passengers were Muslims returning home after completing their hajj duty, and Egyptian workers and Saudis.

The Al Salam Boccaccio 98 of the Egyptian Al Salam Maritime Transport Co. went down nearly 70 km away from the Hurgado port in the south of the country.


Three hundred passengers have been rescued so far, but hopes to find survivors are fading.


Many of the passengers managed to survive by getting on lifeboats. So far, 185 bodies have been recovered, but the death toll may increase as the sea water gets colder at night, officials reported.


The cause of the sink is unclear and radar contact was, reportedly, lost shortly after departure.


Authorities say the last contact was made at 10:00 p.m. on Thursday and no distress signal was received from the vessel.

The only information on the cause of the disaster is high waves and bad weather in the western coast of Saudi Arabia where the vessel left. It is also claimed the overloading in the 35-year ferry may have caused the accident, but Al Salam Maritime Transport Co. Officials reject the claim and underline the capacity was already for 1,400 people. There were also 220 vehicles aboard.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ordered an immediate inquiry into the circumstances in which the boat sank to determine whether it fulfilled the security criteria or not.


Mubarak's spokesman, Suleiman Awad, stressed there was not enough life rafts on board, "Our researches confirm that there was a safety problem, but we cannot anticipate the results of the investigation".


As opposed to Mubarak, Transport Minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour emphasized he has no doubt about the vessel's stability. Red Sea Governor Abu Bakr al-Rashidi announced the formation of a crisis center in the Safaga town of Egypt and an emergency declaration at hospitals in the region.


Egyptians who rushed to Safaga in order to find about their relatives continue waiting in anxiety. They prayed in tears throughout the night for the survival of their relatives. Ahmad Abdul Hamid, a survivor relative, said the vessel was old and asked "How can they make them board such unsuitable vessel?" Several eye witnesses in Safaga said they saw corpses that hit the shore.

Ship afraid of Israel
Rescue efforts have been difficult because of the unsound weather. The officials relentlessly continued their efforts into the night to find any survivors. Britain also dispatched a war ship to the region. Egypt refused the offer of the aid coming from Israeli Fleet. The news reflected in the Israeli media reported Egypt thanked Israel for the offer, but declared the country would overcome the rescue operations of the fleet and air forces. Al Salam 95 ship, the member of the same company, crashed into another ship under the Greek Cypriot part flag in October in the Red Sea, where two people lost their lives and 40 were injured.

MENA (Egyptian State News Agency) revealed 1,158 of 1,272 passengers on board were Egyptians. No Turkish citizens were reported, but one Omani, Canadian and Yemeni and Sudanese and 99 Syrian, four Palestinian and one Arab was included among the passengers.


While Egypt and Saudi Arabia announced they received no distress signal from the ship last night, British Defense Ministry announced they did. The spokesman released: "Rescue Coordination Center received a signal for danger at 11:58 p.m. in the Red Sea. The signal was delivered to France in order to reach Egyptian officials.