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Egyptian ferry carrying 1,300 sinks in Red Sea
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-03 20:21
CAIRO - A ferry carrying 1,300 passengers sank in the Red Sea overnight
and some survivors reached the Egyptian port of Safaga, official sources said on
Friday.
A hand-out
photograph shows the Egyptian ferry Al Salam 89 which has disappeared in
the Red Sea, according to an Egyptian health ministry official, February
3, 2006. [Reuters] | A search and rescue plane spotted a lifeboat near where the 6,600-tonne Al
Salam 89 last had contact with shore at about 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Thursday
evening, one official said.
Rescue boats brought some survivors to Safaga, where the ferry was meant to
arrive on Friday morning, one security official said.
But Egyptian aircraft also saw bodies floating in the water, security sources
said.
Most of the passengers were Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia, officials
said, but at this time of year many Egyptians are still on their way home from
the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Egyptian state news agency MENA quoted official sources in Safaga as
saying the ferry had sunk 57 miles from the Egyptian port of Hurghada, north of
Safaga.
"Some of the passengers survived," it added.
The ferry was on an overnight trip between the Saudi port of Duba and Safaga,
both at the northern end of the Red Sea. It had originally come from Jeddah, the
main port for the pilgrimage.
Coastal stations did not receive any SOS message from the crew, said Adel
Shukri, the head of administration at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which
owns the ferry.
Another company official, Andrea Odone, said he could not confirm that the
ship had sunk or that there were any survivors. "It could take some hours to
work out what happened," Odone told Reuters from the company headquarters in
Cairo.
Transport Minister Mohamed Lutfi Mansour told MENA the armed forced had
deployed four rescue vessels at the scene.
A Saudi border control official in Jeddah said: "We don't know yet what
happened -- if it sank, or overturned, or what."
According to the company's Web site, the Al Salam 89 can carry about 1,400
passengers. Egyptian officials and media called it the Al Salam 98 but the
company's Web site names it as the Al Salam 89.
A sister ship, the Al Salam 95, sank in the Red Sea in October after a
collision with a Cypriot commercial vessel. In that case almost all of the
passengers were rescued.
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