Red Sea Tragedy

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A jolt shook the passenger ferry Al Salam Boccaccio 98 during an overnight voyage across the Red Sea last week, stirring Girgis Rifaat awake in his cabin. "People began yelling 'Fire, fire!'" Rifaat, a 30-year-old Egyptian returning from his job as a salesman in Kuwait, told Time at a hospital in Hurghada. "I realized that the boat was going down." As the vessel listed precariously, Rifaat leapt overboard, swam to a lifeboat and waited 19 hours before being pulled out of the water by a helicopter. Most of the other 1,510 people thought to be on board, mainly Egyptian workers, were not so fortunate. By Saturday, Egyptian search-and-rescue operations had brought 378 survivors ashore, but the likelihood that more than 1,000 others had died made the tragedy one of the worst disasters in maritime history.

The catastrophe began as the Al Salam steamed from the Saudi port of Duba to Sagafa on Egypt's Red Sea coast, where collisions with treacherous coral reefs have led to previous shipping disasters. Some eyewitnesses said the fire on board may have ignited an explosion in the ship's vehicle parking bay, which occurred shortly before the vessel went down. Survivors interviewed by Time also complained of the poor response of the 96-person crew, which reportedly failed to issue a distress signal. Rifaat said that the ship sailed for at least 90 minutes after the first sign of trouble and might have been able to return without loss of life to Duba if it had turned around, which the captain reportedly refused to do. Mohammed Abdallah, 41, another Egyptian survivor, told Time: "They didn't tell anybody anything."

Shipping industry sources described the doomed 35-year-old vessel as a "roll-on, roll-off" model for carrying cars and trucks, on which the European Union imposed strict safety standards following a string of capsize disasters. Says David Osler, industrial editor of Lloyd's List in London: "It's scandalous that a ship of that age is still in business."