Greek rescuers were expected to deploy a robot submarine yesterday to search for the bodies of two French tourists believed to have drowned when a cruise ship sank off a resort island last week.
The ship's captain has blamed Thursday's accident on sea currents that swept the Sea Diamond onto a charted reef, tearing a hole in the ship's hull.
Nearly 1,600 people were rescued before the vessel sank.
Some of the oil that has leaked from the ship has washed ashore, Santorini Mayor Angelos Roussos said on Monday, though he added that "the clean-up company has the situation under control."
Roussos said that the island's local government would not take legal action against the operator of the ship, Louis Cruise Lines, part of a Cyprus-based tourism group. But he said he was concerned about how to guard against such accidents.
"Our island and its beaches are of unique natural beauty and we must protect them in the best possible manner," the mayor said. "The island's economy depends on tourism."
An oceanographic vessel due at Santorini early yesterday will deploy the unmanned sub to take footage of the wreck, looking for the missing passengers and the ship's voyage data recorder, the Merchant Marine Ministry said on Monday.
Jean-Christophe Allain, 45, and his 16-year-old daughter, Maud, are believed to have been trapped in a flooded lower cabin. The missing man's wife told authorities she had narrowly escaped from the cabin.
The rest of the passengers, most of them Americans, reached safety after scrambling onto lifeboats, crossing narrow gangways and climbing down rope ladders.
The 21-year-old Sea Diamond sank some 15 hours later, causing an oil slick that experts worked to clean up on Monday.
Crews worked to contain more than 50 tonnes of oil that have spilled since the 143m vessel sank, while plans were made to seal off or remove the remaining 400 tonnes from the wreckage.
An official involved in the clean-up, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said as many as 100 tonnes may have leaked out.
Although the spill appeared to pose no immediate threat to Santorini's main beaches, the fate of the remaining oil on board was a concern.
"The oil is continuing to leak from the vessel. ... The situation is being contained in the present conditions," said Vassilis Mamaloukas, who is leading the clean-up operation for private Greek contractor Environmental Protection Engineering SA.
"Our priority is to pump the oil from the source of the leak, because it is difficult to control oil from a leak from such a depth. ... If the weather conditions are not favorable we may lose that control."
Investigators queried island boatsmen over allegations the crew had delayed starting the evacuation.
Six crew members of the Greek-flagged ship, including the captain and chief mate, have been charged with negligence.
Coast guard divers on Monday inspected the site of the wreck -- under the 300m-high volcanic cliffs that make Santorini a major tourist attraction -- but the depth and security concerns stopped them from entering the hulk, said a spokesman for the Merchant Marine Ministry.
"They could not enter the wreck, which lies about 130 meters deep, as it still has not yet reached the sea bottom and has a tendency to shift," he said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the