Currents Led to Wreck, Captain Says

By Derek Gatopoulos

A cruise ship captain indicted on negligence charges after his vessel foundered on a volcanic reef and sank in the Aegean Sea blamed strong currents for the accident, state-run television reported Sunday.

Two French tourists have been missing since Thursday when the ship struck rocks and eventually sank off the island of Santorini. All the other people on board — 1,152 passengers and 391 crew members, according to operator Louis Cruise Lines — were rescued.

State-run NET television quoted from what it said were excerpts of the ship captain’s deposition to a public prosecutor on the island of Naxos, blaming currents off the volcanic island for the accident.

“I felt the ship, which had been on a normal course, slip to the right because of sea currents,” NET quoted the captain as saying. “I gave the order for a full turn left. But there was not enough time for the ship to respond.”

Authorities have not named the captain or five other crew members charged in the sinking.

The captain was indicted along with the other crew members on blanket charges of causing a shipwreck through negligence, breaching international shipping safety regulations and polluting the environment, the Cyclades islands public prosecution office said. All have been released pending further testimony.

Most of the ship’s passengers were American, but also included groups from Canada, Britain, Spain, France, Australia, and the Dominican Republic.

Most rescued passengers returned home Friday and Saturday and some described the evacuation as poorly organized and chaotic.

“It was haphazard. It was makeshift. . . . It wasn’t an organized plan,” William Christopher, a Miami firefighter who accompanied a school trip, told the Miami Herald after his return.

A group of Raleigh, N.C., high school students who were aboard the ship arrived home Saturday night to tears and hugs from their families. Another 77 pupils from a middle school in Winston-Salem, N.C., also flew home Saturday.

The missing French passengers were identified as Jean-Christophe Allain, 45, and his 16-year-old daughter, Maud.

The missing man’s wife told authorities she had narrowly escaped from the family’s flooding cabin on a lower deck, near the area where the rocks tore a hole in the hull.

Efforts to search the vessel for them are set to resume Tuesday.

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