The story behind the sinking of the Egyptian ferry
Egypt-Saudi Arabia, Local, 2/7/2006

Regarding the Egyptian ferry that sunk four days ago in the Red Sea with 1415 hundred passengers, one passenger Omar al-Sayyed described how the attempts to defuse the fire, which erupted in the cars storage in the ferry, that lasted for two hours, as being the same amount of time the ferry would have taken has its captain decided to return back to Dabba port.

Omar al-Sayyed described the captain of the ferry as "the crazy man who wanted to prove he is a hero," while another survivor described what had happened as "people were collapsing, heads were hatched, women and children were piling one over the other on iron and glass and every body was crying."

Child Muhammad Ahmad lost all his family members, after his father put him together with his sister in a rescue belt and threw them in the water and put his wife and her infant in another belt, and then he followed them and remained beside Muhammad and his sister until they were put on a rescue boat and refused to take the boat preferring to continue searching for his wife and infant, but he disappeared with them. Muhammad spent 36 hours in the water before he was picked up by another boat.

The third officer at the ferry Rani Kamal talked from a hospital in Saudi Arabia how water, used to put out a fire in a car storage area of the ferry, resulted in the ferry tilting to one of its sides, and that, with the "increase in the water level, the ferry's angle with the sea water reached 25 degrees, which was the beginning of the end (with water leaking on to the ferry causing it to sink)."

The Egyptian media and commentators accused the ferry company of adding more floor levels after buying the ferry from Italy which weakened its structural resistance to wind, as well as the ferry hoisting a Panama country flag in order to avoid set safety standards.

A statement by the company stressed the safety standards are in compliance with the international norms, and that it is licensed to work in the European territorial waters and an evidence on that it sailed to Genoa, Italy in 2001 and France and Greece in 2002.

Previous Stories:
  1000 missing in Egyptian ferry incident   (2/7/2006)
  Saudi Crown Prince visits Alexandria Library   (7/4/2001)
  Saudi jet makes emergency stop in Cairo   (1/8/1998)

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