The confirmed death toll of a ferry disaster in the Adriatic Sea has risen to 13, as officials on Tuesday warned that the discovery of stowaways on board meant the true number of victims could be far higher.
Greek and Italian authorities were still unable to say with any certainty how many paying passengers were on board the Norman Atlantic when it burst into flames in stormy seas near the island of Corfu on Sunday.
“It is likely that we will find other victims in the wreckage,” Giuseppe Volpe, the prosecutor in charge of a criminal probe into the disaster, said after illegal migrants were also found among the survivors.
Photo: Reuters
Three have so far been identified — two Afghans and a Syrian, who have requested political asylum — but more are expected to have hidden inside trucks parked on the deck where the fire started.
There were also fears some passengers may have suffocated or been burnt to death in their cabins.
The Italian coastguard confirmed the body of an 11th dead passenger had been recovered on Tuesday. The disaster also claimed the lives of two Albanian seamen, who died from injuries caused when a cable linking their tugboat to the ferry snapped.
Nearly 40 passengers listed as having been on the Italian-owned ferry were still unaccounted for after a mammoth 34-hour rescue operation, but it was unclear whether this was because they were dead or down to errors in the ship’s manifest.
Greek survivor Urania Thireou offered a possible explanation.
“At the start, there were people who got into the biggest lifeboat,” she said at a hotel in the Italian port city of Brindisi. “They got it into the water, but we were told afterwards that they were not rescued.”
International rescue efforts were scaled down on Tuesday despite the uncertainty, with the Italian navy’s San Giorgio-class amphibious landing vessel returning to port in the early evening with about 200 survivors on board.
Officially, 427 people, including 56 crew members, were rescued from the flames in an operation described as unprecedented by Italian authorities, well short of the revised total of 475 passengers and crew on board the ship.
The ship’s Italian owner, ANEK, and its Italian captain all face possible manslaughter charges arising from Volpe’s investigation. Greece also announced its own probe on Tuesday.
Passengers’ accounts paint the Norman Atlantic’s crew as being completely unprepared for an emergency.
Many have said it was either thick smoke or other passengers who woke those sleeping, not the crew or alarms, and almost all have said they received no instructions from staff.
Teodora Doulis, a Greek woman whose husband, Giorgios, died in the disaster, was among a number of passengers who described the car deck — thought to have been where the fire started — as being covered with fuel.
“It stank of gas. The ship should never have left port in that condition,” she said.
Two key questions for investigators will be why the fire gained such force so quickly and why it was not contained in the area where it started.
The ship’s owner, Italian company Visemar di Navigazione, has acknowledged that a Dec. 19 safety inspection highlighted a problem with at least one fire door, but insists it was fixed before the vessel set sail.
The deficiencies were all registered as fixed by the end of the day when the inspection took place.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
RSS