Red Sea ferry survivors say captain fled

By Tom Perry

SAFAGA, Egypt (Reuters) – Survivors of the Red Sea ferry
disaster said on Saturday the Egyptian captain had fled his
burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them to their fate, as
hopes faded of finding some 800 missing people.

Some passengers, plucked alive from the sea or from boats
after the ferry caught fire and sank early on Friday, said crew
members had told them not to worry about the blaze below deck
and even ordered them to take off lifejackets.

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. The company will issue a written
statement on the disaster later on Saturday, he added.

Rescue workers have recovered 195 bodies from the Red Sea
and saved 400 people, but about 800 more, most of them Egyptian
workers returning from Saudi Arabia, are missing.

The director of the Red Sea Ports Authority, Major-General
Mahfouz Taha, said 378 survivors had come ashore on the
Egyptian side. The Saudi authorities said they had picked up
22.

Survivors said a fire broke out below deck shortly after
the 35-year-old vessel left the Saudi port of Duba on Thursday
evening with 1,272 passengers and a crew of about 100.

The ship began to list but the crew continued to sail out
into the Red Sea rather than turn back to the Saudi port, they
told reporters in the Egyptian port of Safaga, where the ferry
should have landed early on Friday.

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, speaking to Reuters Television.

“The captain was the first to leave and we were surprised
to see the boat sinking,” added Khaled Hassan, another
survivor.

Other survivors also reported that the crew had played down
the gravity of the situation and withheld lifejackets.

“There was a fire but the crew stopped the people from
putting on lifejackets so that it wouldn’t cause a panic,” said
Abdel Raouf Abdel Nabi, one of the survivors.

“There was a blaze down below. The crew said ‘Don’t worry,
we will put it out.’ When things got really bad the crew just
went off in the lifeboats and left us on board,” said Nader
Galal Abdel Shafi, another arrival on the same rescue boat.

FIRE BROKE OUT ON VEHICLE

Shirin Hassan, the head of the maritime section of the
Egyptian Ministry of Transport, told state television the fire
seemed to have broken out on a vehicle on the lower car deck.

The crew thought they had put it out but it flared up
again, he said, citing a preliminary analysis.

It was not immediately clear why coastguards did not appear
to have received any distress signal from the ferry.

State news agency MENA said on Friday morning a ship did
pick up a message from the ferry’s captain saying he was in
danger of sinking. It did not say how the ship reacted.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ordered an
immediate investigation into the disaster, visited some of the
injured in a hospital in the port of Hurghada on Saturday.

Mubarak ordered the government to pay 30,000 Egyptian
pounds ($5,200) in compensation to each of the families of the
dead and 15,000 pounds to each of the survivors, MENA said.

In Safaga, riot police fired four tear gas canisters at
angry relatives of the passengers after some in the crowd had
thrown stones at the police holding them back at the gate to
the port, witnesses said.

In the morning an official came and read out a partial list
of the names of survivors to the assembled relatives.

Fathi Kamel cried out: “Allahu Akbar (God is Most Great)”
when he heard that his nephew was among the survivors.

Others broke down in tears when the reading ended and they
had not heard the names they were waiting for.

Egyptian presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad said on
Friday there may not have been enough lifeboats.

“The speed with which the ship sank and the lack of
sufficient lifeboats indicate there was some deficiency,” he
told Egyptian television.

A shipping company official said the Saudi authorities had
confirmed that everything was in order when the ship sailed.

MENA said the passenger list included more than 1,000
Egyptians, as well as other nationalities, including Saudis,
Syrians, and a Canadian.

A sister ship of the sunken ferry, the Al Salam 95, sank in
the Red Sea in October after a collision with a Cypriot
commercial vessel. All but four of the passengers were saved.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Hammond in Saudi Arabia)