Ferry Goes Down With 1,400 Aboard
Confusion Clouds Search in Red Sea

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 4, 2006

SAFAGA, Egypt, Feb. 3 -- Search boats roamed the Red Sea on Friday night on a hunt for survivors and victims from among the more than 1,400 passengers and crew aboard an Egyptian ferry that sank early Friday morning. Most of the missing had perished, according to Egyptian officials who said that almost 300 had been rescued and that 183 corpses were retrieved from the water.

Transport Minister Mohamed Lufti said four naval vessels were engaged in the search. "The Coast Guard is doing everything in its power to try to rescue these people," he said.

Official accounts of the number rescued varied wildly throughout the evening, exasperating friends and relatives of the passengers. Here in Safaga, a port city that was the destination of the ship bound from Saudi Arabia, a desperate and angry crowd waited for hours without word of who had survived or where they might be.

At 11 p.m., nearly 24 hours after the sinking, an official emerged from the sealed-off harbor area to offer the crowd a full passenger list.

"Sayeed, Abdul Fattah; Sayeed, Mahmoud; Sayeed, Ibrahim; Sayeed, Sami . . ." the official called out in a last-name-first roll call that jumped from letter to letter out of order, frustrating the listeners. "When are you going to give the letter 'ayn?' " several called out when that character of the Arabic alphabet was missed.

"This is not right!" said Mohamed Ahmed, seeking his brother-in-law, Mohamed Abdel Hamid, who had traveled to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage to Mecca. "We have been waiting all day, and this is all they have."

The ferry El Salam 98 had been scheduled to arrive here about 3 a.m. Friday from the Saudi port of Duba, approximately 120 miles to the east. Sometime between midnight and 2 a.m., the 35-year old vessel lost contact with shore, Egyptian officials said, but no distress signal reached the coast. Rough weather was reported on the windy, cloudy night.

Egyptian officials did not say how long it took for rescue operations to get underway.

About 1,150 of the passengers were Egyptian, the majority of them laborers who worked in Saudi Arabia or Persian Gulf oil states. The rest included 99 Saudis, six Syrians, four Palestinians, a Canadian, an Omani, a Sudanese and a citizen of the United Arab Emirates. Ninety-eight crew members were aboard, Egypt's official MENA news agency said.

Nile Television at one point said survivors numbered only 29, while the El Salam Maritime Transport Co., which owns the ferry, put the number at nearly 300. Company officials said some survivors arrived at Safaga late Friday, before midnight, but no one at the port could confirm the news.

The ship was built in Italy in 1970 and had been owned by El Salam since 1987. It carried vehicles as well as passengers, and its design made it vulnerable to heavy seas if the vehicle-deck doors were not fully closed, according to industry analysts.

"If these doors are open for any reason, then you've had it," Richard Clayton, news editor at the shipping weekly Fairplay, told the Reuters news agency. "The more we consider the various elements, weather does seem to have been a factor. All you need is bashing by the sea, and suddenly you get an ingress of water."

According to the Associated Press, the Genoa-based Italian Naval Registry, which has certified the ferry for safety since its construction in 1970, said the vessel never had any problems and passed its last structural inspection in June 2005.

In Safaga, riot police blocked the entrance to the port, a nearby terminal for pilgrims and the streets leading to Safaga Central Hospital. Most of the expectant crowd gathered at the port. Many wore the brown caftans and ragged turbans of Egypt's rural population. They huddled against the desert night chill, and some were beginning to nod off as midnight approached.

"Nothing but rumors and silence," said Ali Assawi Arawi, who was waiting for his brother Mohammed to return from his job in Saudi Arabia for vacation in Egypt. "They don't even give us sympathy, much less news."

"We heard about the boat and they say people are alive, but there are no names," said Abdul Salam Latif, who was awaiting word of a cousin.

Recently, Egyptian officials have been promising new safety rules and inspections for the coastal ferries.

The last similar disaster occurred in 1991, when a ship hit a reef off the Red Sea resort of Hurghada; almost 500 passengers died, many of them devoured by sharks.

In October, a ferry owned by El Salam collided with a Cypriot cargo vessel near the southern end of the Suez Canal and sank. None of the passengers drowned, but two people were killed in a stampede.