ship carrying 1300 Muslim pilgrims goes down

I heard there's a rescue ship on the way that can hold 1400 passengers, but they are already seing bodies. It's not looking good. I wonder what could have happened. I don't see how it could be terrorism since they were all Muslims on the ship.

Egypt also turned down an offer of assistance from Israel.

Not all terrorists are Muslims.

I am not presently guessing terrorism of any sort is involved.

Nice attitude... I bet you're really fun at parties.

Ferry hit by blaze before sinking

A fire broke out on an ageing ferry before it sank in the Red Sea with more than 1,400 people on board, officials said.

Only 324 of the passengers and crew have so far made it to safety and the others are feared dead, missing in cold waters.

Egyptian transport minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour said investigators were still working to determine the fire's connection to the sinking.

He described the fire as "small" and said there was no explosion on the vessel, which went down before dawn local time on Friday.

Nearly 140 survivors have now been brought to the Egyptian port of Hurghada - the first significant group to come to shore.

They walked off a rescue ship down a ramp, some of them barefoot and shivering, wrapped in blankets, and were immediately put on buses for the hospital.

Many of the survivors claimed that the fire began early in the trip, but the ship kept going and the fire burned for hours.

"They decided to keep going. It's negligence," one survivor said before he was moved along by police. Another said it was "like the Titanic on fire".

Meanwhile, a shipping expert said the vessel involved in the disaster was a sister ship of the British Herald of Free Enterprise, which sunk off Zeebrugge in 1987 killing 187 people.

Andrew Linington, of the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers, said both ships were once part of the Townsend Thorenson fleet. He said there were eight ships in the series, however they were built at different European yards and had different characteristics.

Fires don't cause a capsize.

The weather was bad, strong wind I believe.

Presumably the ship was overloaded, too many passengers, and they all went to one side when the fire took hold? The fire burnt for some hours before the capsize.

I think the news will be clearer today, concerning the cause. Quite a few passengers have been brought ashore, and hopefully some ship's crew too.

Wow, it was a ro-ro vessel like the one which capsized in the English Channel

cjhsa wrote:

Egypt also turned down an offer of assistance from Israel.

So, we turned down offers of assistance from Cuba after the hurricane, what is that supposed to prove?

Egypt survivors say captain fled

Feb. 4 - Survivors of the Red Sea ferry disaster said its captain fled the burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them as hopes faded on finding some of the 800 passengers still missing.


Some passengers plucked alive from the sea or from boats after the ferry caught fire and sank early on Friday (February 3) said crew had told them not to worry about a fire below deck and even ordered them to take off lifejackets.

Officials at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the Al Salam 98, were not immediately available to answer the allegations.

Rescue workers have recovered 195 bodies from the Red Sea and saved 390 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 boat kept on sailing for 3 hours and a half after it caught fire. The fire started from the store room underneath." said survivor Nabeel Zekri. When asked when the fire started, an unidentified female survivor said, "after two hours. The captain refused to take it back."

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.

Shirin Hassan, the head of the maritime section of the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, told state television that the fire seemed to have broken out in one of the vehicles on the the lower car decks. The crew thought they had put the fire out but it flared up again, he said, citing a preliminary analysis.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the captain, named as Sayyed Omar, or why coastguards did not appear to have received any distress signal from the ferry.

State news agency MENA said that 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.

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

A presidential spokesman said on Friday there may not have been enough lifeboats, although 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.