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.
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