Hope Fades For Missing Ship Passengers

Rescue boats have picked up 435 survivors from the Egyptian ferry that sank in the Red Sea after a fire on board, police in Sagafa, Egypt said Saturday. Most of the ship's 1,400 passengers and crew are feared lost.

Transport Ministry spokesman Mohammed Amin said there were 327 survivors so far. The discrepancy in survivor tolls could not be immediately reconciled.

Nearly 140 survivors were brought to the Egyptian port of Hurghada before dawn Saturday, the first significant group to come to shore. They walked off a rescue ship down a ramp, some of them barefoot and shivering, wrapped in blankets, and were immediately put on buses for the hospital. Several were brought on stretchers, but it could be seen that they were alive.

Coast Guard vessels pulled some 185 bodies from the sea Friday, and at least 314 survivors escaped on lifeboats, officials said.

Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene Friday afternoon, about 10 hours after the 35-year-old ferry likely went down. As darkness descended Friday at the site, some 57 miles off the Egyptian port of Hurghada, there were fears the death toll could be extremely high.

The ferry did not have enough lifeboats, a spokesman for President Hosni Mubarak said.

"The swift sinking of the ferry and the lack of sufficient lifeboats suggests there was some violation, but we cannot say until the investigation is complete," said presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad, quoted by the semiofficial news agency MENA.

The journey – 120 miles – should have been routine, reports CBS News correspondent David Hawkins. Its destination was the port of Safaga where it was due at 3 a.m. Friday, but at about 1 a.m. it disappeared from radar screens. No distress signal was received.

Transport minister, Mohammed Lutfy Mansour, told reporters a fire broke out on the aging ferry before and investigators were still working to determine the fire's connection to the sinking. He described the fire as "small" and said there was no explosion on the vessel, which went down before dawn on Friday.

Many said the fire began early in the trip, between 90 minutes or 2 ½ hours after departure according to various accounts, but the ship kept going and the fire burned for hours. Their accounts varied on the location of the fire, with some mentioning a storeroom or engine room.

"They decided to keep going. It's negligence," one survivor, Nabil Zikry, said before he was moved along by police, who tried to keep the survivors from talking to journalists.

"It was like the Titanic on fire," another one shouted.

Any survivors still in the Red Sea could go into shock as temperatures fell in the already cold waters, which average in the upper 60s in February. The waters in the area are up to 3,000 feet deep.

Egyptian regulations require life jackets on the boat, but implementation of safety procedures are often lax. It was not known if the ship had enough life jackets and whether the passengers put them on when the ship sank.

Safety standards we take for granted in the West are not in force everywhere, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips and those who work in the business think they know why.

"There are double standards," maritime business writer Patrick Neylon told Phillips. "Regulations are much tighter in northern Europe. They're a bit looser in the Mediterranean and they're looser still in parts of the Third World."

Ahmed Elew, an Egyptian in his 20s, said he went to the ship's crew to report the fire and they told him to help with the water hoses to put it out. At one point there was an explosion, he said.

When the ship began sinking, Elew said he jumped into the water and swam for several hours. He said he saw one lifeboat overturn because it was overloaded with people. He eventually got into another lifeboat. "Around me people were dying and sinking," he said.

"Who is responsible for this?" he said. "Somebody did not do their job right. These people must be held accountable."

Rescue efforts appeared confused. Egyptian officials initially turned down a British offer to divert a warship to the scene to help out and a U.S. offer to send a P3-Orion maritime naval patrol aircraft to the area. The British craft, HMS Bulwark, headed toward from the southern Red Sea where it was operating, then turned around when the offer was rejected.

But then Egypt reversed itself and asked for both the Orion and the Bulwark to be sent — then finally decided to call off the Bulwark, deciding it was too far away to help, said Lt. Cdr. Charlie Brown of the U.S. 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain. In the end, the Orion — which has the capability to search underwater from the air — was sent, but the Bulwark was not, he said.

The ship, "Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98," which was also carrying about 220 vehicles, left Thursday at 7:30 p.m. from the Saudi port of Dubah on a 120-mile trip to the Egyptian port of Safaga, south of Hurghada. It had been scheduled to arrive at Safaga at 3 a.m.

About 1,400 passengers, along with a crew of 98, were on board, said Awad.

The passengers included about 1,200 Egyptians, as well as 99 Saudis, three Syrians, two Sudanese, and a Canadian, officials said. It was not clear where the other passengers were from. Some of them were probably Muslim pilgrims who had overstayed their visas after last month's hajj pilgrimage to work in the kingdom.

The agent for the ship in Saudi Arabia, Farid al-Douadi, said the vessel had the capacity for 2,500 passengers.

"It's a roll-on, roll-off ferry, and there is big question mark over the stability of this kind of ship," said David Osler of the London shipping paper Lloyds List. "It would only take a bit of water to get on board this ship and it would be all over. ... The percentage of this type of ferry involved in this type of disaster is huge."

Osler said there was no indication of terrorism, adding that "bad weather is looking likely."

Mamdouh al-Orabi, the manager of Al-Salaam Maritime Transport Company, which owns the ferry, said the company became concerned about the Al-Salaam 98 early Friday and informed another of its ships that was heading from Safaga to Dubah.

The Al-Salaam 98, registered in Panama, was built in 1971 and renovated in 1991, al-Orabi said. It had a maximum capacity of 2,500 passengers, the ship's Saudi agent, Farid al-Douadi, said.

Osler of Lloyds List said that last June the ship passed a structural survey test conducted by the International Safety Management Code.

A ship owned by the same company, also carrying pilgrims, collided with a cargo ship at the southern entrance to the Suez Canal in October, causing a stampede among passengers trying to escape the sinking ship. Two people were killed and 40 injured.