ship carrying 1300 Muslim pilgrims goes down

It had 2 extra upper decks added, too.

These vessels would not get a licence to operate in Europe.

SAFAGA, Egypt (CNN) -- Egypt's transport minister has said a blaze aboard an Egyptian ferry set off a sequence of events that led it to sink Friday in the Red Sea, causing what officials fear may be around 1,000 deaths.

The minister said Saturday an initial investigation showed a truck erupted in flames in the hold of the ship.

After the crew tried to put out the fire, the captain's efforts to turn the boat around caused it to tilt in heavy winds and ultimately sink.

Some survivors later described the tilting, saying it occurred slowly before the vessel sank.

Some survivors at a hospital in Hurghada told CNN they saw smoke, which smelled as if it came from an electrical fire, about two and a half hours into the trip. Hurghada is off Egypt's north-central Red Sea coast.

The seas were rough when the Al Salam Boccaccio 98 capsized, said Transport Minister Mohamed Loutfy Mansour.

Rescuers who plucked nearly 400 survivors from the 60-degree waters were continuing to search Saturday for nearly 1,000 other people feared dead.

State-run Nile Television said Saturday there were 389 survivors. By daylight Saturday, 185 bodies had been pulled from the 3,000-foot-deep waters, officials said.

Rescuers were pessimistic about finding more people alive. "There aren't expected to be many survivors, because it's been so long since the ship went down," a source close to the operations told Reuters.

In Safaga, one hysterical woman hammered on an iron gate to the port, where survivors from the Al Salam Boccaccio 98 ferry were being brought ashore.

Some angry relatives threw rocks at police as they awaited information about passengers on the ferry.

The port officials were not distributing lists of survivor names to the crowd outside, who repeatedly tried to break through a line of police with sticks.

"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 gates of the port in Safaga for news of his cousin.

"All I want to know (is) if he's dead or alive," he told The Associated Press.

Stability questions
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to the port of Hurghada, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) further north of Safaga, on Saturday to oversee the rescue operation and visit survivors.

He told reporters the government would pay emergency compensation to survivors and relatives of the dead. Survivors are to receive 15,000 Egyptian pounds ($2,600 U.S.) and families of the dead are to get twice that.

A Maritime Transport spokesman said the Al Salam Boccaccio 98 was certified to carry passengers until 2010 and was fully compliant with maintenance regulations.

However, one man in the crowd told CNN he had taken the same ship on the same route a month ago and that the ship appeared overloaded on that trip, packed with passengers and laden with eight large trucks filled with freight, the man said.

He also said the clasps that secured lifeboats to the ship were rusted.

Other former passengers also reported that the ferry was antiquated.

"It's a roll-on, roll-off ferry, and there is big question mark over the stability of this kind of ship," David Osler, of the London shipping paper Lloyds List, told AP.

"It would only take a bit of water to get on board this ship and it would be all over. ... The percentage of this type of ferry involved in this type of disaster is huge."

Offer rejected
Egypt's state-run Nile TV said the passengers included at least 115 foreigners, about 100 of them Saudi nationals. Most of those on board were Egyptian laborers returning from jobs in Saudi Arabia.

Four Egyptian frigates and a navy destroyer, along with coast guard boats and helicopters were at the search-and-rescue site, about 95 kilometers ( 57 miles) from Hurghada, said Adel Shoukri, a spokesman for the transport company.

Egyptian government officials asked mariners in the Saudi port of Jeddah for help, and Saudi Arabia sent two vessels.

Egypt turned down Britain's offer to send an amphibious assault ship, saying the ship was too large for the search effort.

The ship, which was built in 1970 and launched in Italy, flew a Panamanian flag.

It was refurbished in 1990 at an Egyptian shipyard. The vessel was involved in a collision in 1999, according to a ferry company spokesman.

Cairo Bureau Chief Ben Wedeman and Correspondent Paula Hancocks contributed to this report.

[...]
Giving the most authoritative account yet of what happened, an officer from the Al Salam 98 said the car deck on the doomed ferry had flooded as crew members battled a fire, causing listing which eventually took the ship down. ...
Rani Kamal, third officer on the ship, told the Arabic news channel Al Arabiya from a Saudi hospital the car deck had flooded during the firefighting operation, making the ship list. Government officials said earlier the blaze began in a vehicle.

"The ferry sank due to firefighting operations. Water flooded the garage (car deck), which is where the fire started, and it pooled on one side," he said.

"Then the water increased and increased until the ship listed sharply. It listed five, then 10 degrees and then 15 and then 25 degrees and that was the beginning of the end," said Kamal, who was rescued from a dinghy by Saudi coastguards.

He did not explain further. Passengers have also reported a fire below decks and serious listing.

The captain of the ship, Sayed Omar, is unaccounted for. The second officer, who has been rescued, has spoken to the authorities but not to the media.
[...]
The owners of the ferry, the Cairo-based el Salam Maritime Transport Company, said in a statement the ferry complied with all international safety regulations and was certified to work in European waters.

It said the ferry had gone to Genoa in Italy for the world summit in 2001 and to France and Greece in 2002. [noted in one of my above posts already.]

"As for the accident complications, it is quite early to determine the actual causes as all the authorities and company officers now are mainly concerned with the rescue operations as first priority," the statement added.
[...]
The unanswered questions are why the captain and crew did not send a distress signal to shore stations and why they do not appear to have evacuated the ship in good time. Survivors say the fire burnt for several hours before the ferry sank.

The first thing which leapt into my mind was, Lord Jim,