Cairo – An investigation into the sinking of a Red Sea ferry blamed a “wicked collaboration” between the ship’s owners and corrupt safety inspectors for the disaster that killed about 1,000 people, an Egyptian news agency reported Wednesday.
The parliamentary committee investigating the Feb. 3 sinking also accused the Egyptian government of failing to launch a prompt rescue operation, the semiofficial Middle East News Agency reported.
The report on the Feb. 3 sinking of the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 found it was overloaded and using forged documents to hide a shortage of safety equipment. The report said authorities and the owners negligently allowed the ship to sail between Egypt and Saudi Arabia despite serious shortcomings.
The sinking struck a deep chord in Egypt, where negligence is often blamed for large accidents. Victims’ relatives demonstrated for three straight days in February in Safaga, the port where the ship never arrived.
The report said Al-Salam Maritime Transport Co. failed to respond quickly to the disappearance of its ferry, saying the company owned two other vessels that could have arrived within two hours to look for survivors.
“This amounted to huge negligence in the rescue operation,” the report said.
Egyptian government ships reached the scene of the sinking, about 55 miles off the Egyptian coast, about 10 hours afterward.
The 35-year-old ferry was carrying 1,408 passengers and crew and about 220 vehicles from the Saudi port of Dubah to Safaga. A fire broke out in its parking bay, which the crew did not manage to extinguish. Eventually the ship capsized. Only about 400 people survived.
The report said that by international maritime rules the ship should not have been carrying more than 1,168 passengers. The owner of the shipping line, Mamdouh Ismail, told The Associated Press it was carrying 1,312 passengers.
The report accused Al-Salam of forging maintenance certificates that testified to the good condition of the ferry’s life rafts and lifeboats.
There had been a “wicked collaboration” between the company and the Egyptian Commission of Maritime Safety that enabled the ferry to operate while evading “minimum safety requirements,” the report said.
The report recommended that the authorities show “no mercy to those who caused the loss of Egyptian lives and corrupted the maritime safety commission.”
