The operation to recover bodies from the ferry that sank off South Korea last month has been suspended due to heavy seas, a spokesman said yesterday, amid concern that many of the missing may never be found.
Seventeen days after the 6,825-tonne Sewol capsized and sank, 228 people have been confirmed dead, with 74 still missing.
“Divers were unable to dive late Friday and early today due to fast currents and high waves whipped up by gusty winds,” South Korean Coast Guard spokesman Ko Myung-suk told journalists.
More than 100 divers were on standby, waiting for the waves to die down, he said. Dive teams have been working in challenging and sometimes hazardous conditions, officials said. They have to grope their way down guiding ropes to the sunken ship, laying on its side on the seabed at a depth of 40m.
South Korean Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries spokesman Park Seung-ki said bedding materials from the ship were found as far as 30km from the disaster site on Friday.
As days go by, personal belongings and debris from the ship have been spotted further and further away, fueling concerns that strong currents may have swept some bodies into the open sea.
As a precaution, recovery workers put rings of netting around the site days ago.
The relatives of those still missing are insisting that all the bodies be recovered before efforts begin to raise the sunken ferry.
The Sewol capsized on April 16 with 476 people on board — more than 300 of them from the same Danwon High School in Ansan, an industrial city just south of Seoul.
It is one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters but public anger and frustration has been amplified due to greed and irresponsibility being blamed for the poor handling of the catastrophe.
The captain and 14 of his crew have been arrested after being the first to leave the ship without helping all passengers to safety.
The Sewol’s regular captain, who was off duty on the day of the accident, has told prosecutors that the ferry operator — Chonghaejin Marine Co — “brushed aside” repeated warnings that the 20-year-old ship had stability issues following a renovation in 2012.
Two Chonghaejin officials were arrested on Friday on charges of having the ferry overloaded well beyond its legal limit.
The ferry owners have also become the focus of an ever-widening probe.
South Korea’s government has come under strong criticism over the initially slow rescue response, as well as lax safety standards and collusion between the industry and regulators, which were partly blamed for the scale of the disaster.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of