Captain refused action to thwart ferry disaster

HURGHADA, Egypt -- The smell of oily smoke reached the passenger deck of the Alsalam Boccaccio 98, and engineering student Isra Ibrahim Abdul-Rahman asked the crew what was amiss.

Crew members said it was just a little fire down below. We're taking care of it, they said.

Later, there was more smoke, more questions, more reassurances.

Finally, around 1 a.m. Friday, black smoke billowed from the ferry's vehicle deck, and the Boccaccio 98 began to list to the right. Desperately, the crew and captain ordered passengers to gather on the left.

In a matter of minutes, the ship sank in the Red Sea. Passengers and crew -- about 1,400 people in all, officials said -- threw themselves overboard and scrambled to find rubber dinghies drifting in the roiling waters. None of the 10 larger lifeboats, each of which could hold 100 people, was lowered into the water.

"The crew and captain never said abandon ship. They kept reassuring us until the end. By then, it was every passenger for himself," said Abdul-Rahman, who was convalescing in Hurghada, Egypt, Saturday from a harrowing night at sea.

Abdul-Rahman was one of about 400 survivors. About 200 bodies have been retrieved from the sea. Another 800 people are missing and probably dead, Egyptian authorities said. At least 20 of the passengers were children.

It was a preventable disaster, survivors said Saturday. Passengers and crew members interviewed at Hurghada General Hospital, which overlooks the sea, said that the fire and efforts to put it out eventually caused the sinking but that there had been plenty of time to turn back before the ship went down.

Flames broke out less than two hours after the ferry, a 35-year- old vessel owned by El Salam Maritime Transport Co., had set out from the Saudi port of Duba. The captain insisted on heading west toward his destination on Egypt's shore, Safaga. For several hours, the ship continued to sail as fires flared repeatedly. Within 60 miles of the Egyptian coast, it sank.

"If we had only gone back to Saudi Arabia," said Abdul Rahman, 17, with a sigh as she huddled under a hospital blanket. She was returning to Egypt from a visit to her father, who works, like thousands of Egyptians, in oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia.

"The captain's word is law," said Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed, a maintenance crew member who was told to help put out the flames. The captain, identified by Ahmed and others as Sayyed Omar, was seen jumping overboard as the Boccaccio 98 listed.

During the ordeal, survivors said, no one received instructions for inflating the rubber life rafts, which hold about 25 passengers and were contained in buoyant barrels. Egyptian rescuers took up to 18 hours to pick up some of the survivors. The sinking was not announced until 12 hours after the ship had lost contact with land.

Ahmed, the maintenance crewman, said he fought the fire with sea water pumped into the ship through hoses. The fire would go out and revive, Ahmed said. "We couldn't figure out the cause," he added in a low murmur.

The long battle against inextinguishable flames had a fatal consequence, Ahmed concluded. "The water wasn't draining. Pumps weren't working right."

Tamer Fikreh Hakim, a ship restaurant worker, said, "Drains were blocked by cargo. The ship was filling up."

In effect, the pair said, the Boccaccio 98 sank itself.

As smoke grew heavier, passengers milled on the upper deck, and some quarreled with crew members about whether to don life jackets. "Some crew said, just relax, go to your room," said Shabaan Ragat Shabaan, a driver who worked in Saudi Arabia during the annual Islamic pilgrimage season and was on his way home to Alexandria.

Eventually, most people put on vests, added Ashraf Sayyed Mohamed, another driver. "They couldn't stop us," he said. "People began to panic."

As smoke began to visibly pour from the rear of the ship, "everyone was running around asking what to do. The captain said nothing. The crew, though, they began to put on life jackets, too," Mohamed said.

"We're not foolish," said Abdul-Rahman. "All the people rushed to the deck and begged the captain to turn back. He refused. He contacted no one. He was crazy!"

When the ship rolled to the right, people began to shout, "It's tilting, it's tilting," witnesses said. "We of the crew know that if the ship leans 20 degrees, it's finished. It took only a few minutes. The captain told everyone to go to port side, but it meant nothing," said Hakim, the waiter.

Then passengers tumbled into the Red Sea.

Abdul-Rahman, wearing the black robes of pious Muslim women, bobbed in her life vest until she spotted a dinghy. "Some of the people knew how to inflate them. You know, pulling a strap and all that," she said.

The drivers Shabaan and Mohamed, who are both 36, swam to a raft inflated by a crew member. They saw one lifeboat afloat upside down; desperate passengers tried to turn it over. They failed. "I began to see some bodies face down," said Shabaan.

Hakim clung to a railing as the ship went down, waiting for the water to rise closer before leaping into the sea. People who were sliding off grabbed his legs and scratched his face. "They were pulling me. I held on and asked God for strength," he said in the hospital, his cheeks and knees marked with abrasions.

In the water, he joined Ahmed, 32, the maintenance crewman, and more than 20 others aboard a dinghy. They were soon overwhelmed by 30 more people, and the dinghy began to sink. Fikreh Hakim, 29, said "the passengers were up to their necks in water" when he spied a floating barrel, swam to it and inflated another raft.

Abdul-Rahman said she saw a ship pass close enough to help not long after the sinking. "But it didn't stop," she said. "Only God was looking out for me or anyone."

When found, the survivors' rafts were pulled toward Egyptian naval ships and boats sent by El Salam Maritime. Survivors were treated at the hospital in Hurghada, a nearby military hospital and one in Safaga, 30 miles south.

In their ward, the drivers made plans for returning to Saudi Arabia. "What can we do?" Shabaan said. "There's no real money in Egypt." The equivalent of a few dollars lay on a bed stand next to him, drying.

Hakim, who was spitting up phlegm and water, was evidently worried about his reputation. "Tell them," he called across the ward to Ahmed, "that the crew helped the passengers."

A message on El Salam's Web site denied that the captain and top officers escaped by lifeboat and abandoned passengers. The officers "are until this moment missing either dead or alive," the statement said. "None of the lifeboats have been used to evacuate passengers or crew members since the vessel listed and capsized. Only life rafts have been used for the passenger evacuation." Company officials said the search for survivors will go on.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Saturday that he was following the rescue operation closely, the official MENA news agency reported. He ordered his government to pay about $5,200 in compensation to the family of each of the dead and about half that to each survivor.

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