(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Italy said yesterday its navy had recovered eight bodies following a fire on a ferry in the Adriatic Sea, but admitted that dozens of people thought to have been on board remained unaccounted for.
As survivors described a terrifying ordeal that could easily have claimed far more lives, Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi confirmed that there had been 43 more people listed on the ill-fated Norman Atlantic when it left the Greek port of Patras than the 427 known to have been rescued or dead.
But Lupi said it was unclear if the discrepancy was due to errors on the passenger list or no-shows at boarding, rather than indication of a much bigger loss of life than initially reported in stormy seas off the coast of Albania.
"It is up to the departure port to match up their list and the people (rescued). "That is why we are continuing our (search) effort: we cannot know what the exact number was."
Italian navy chief of staff Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi said military planes were continuing to overfly the area around the ferry checking for bodies.
None of the statements made by survivors of the disaster have so far given any indication that as many as 40 passengers may have died. The uncertainty over the scale of the disaster emerged hours after the 24-hour operation to evacuate the ferry was completed in the early afternoon.
Ship captain Argilio Giacomazzi, 62, upheld centuries of maritime tradition by ensuring he was the last man off, handing over to Italian navy officers at 2.50pm (1350 GMT).
His conduct was in marked contrast to that of the last Italian sea captain to make global headlines, Francesco Schettino, the Costa Concordia skipper currently on trial for manslaughter abandoning a sinking cruise liner on which 32 people died in January 2012.
Wrapped in blankets and with many of them sporting bandages, 49 of the 478 passengers and crew who were on board the ferry when it caught fire shortly after dawn on Sunday disembarked from a merchant ship at the Italian port of Bari.
They and other evacuees told how the fire triggered panic which the crew appeared ill-prepared to deal with.
One of the first passengers off in Bari told reporters he had thought he was going to die as parts of the boat became engulfed by thick smoke as the ferry was travelling from Greece from Italy.
"We did not know what to do. The staff had no idea how to get people off the boat," he said.
"The lifeboats did not work, there was only one of them in the water and none of the crew were there to help people."
The evacuation was completed nearly 36 hours after a fire broke out on the car deck and left the huge vessel drifting dangerously.
Questions are now being asked about how the fire started and why it was not contained.
Bari prosecutor Giuseppe Volpe announced a criminal investigation which will seek to establish whether negligence contributed to the disaster.
Teodora Douli, the wife of a Greek passenger who died on Sunday, described how she watched her husband die in front of her after they ended up in the water. "We spent four hours in the water," she said yesterday. "I tried to save him but I couldn't. We are dying, we're dying, he told me.
"I watched my husband die," she added in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA at the hospital she was helicoptered to. "He was bleeding through his nose, perhaps because he banged his head on the side of the ship."
Other evacuees were flown to the Greek island of Corfu, where lorry driver Fotis Santakidis described how the smell of the smoke from the fire had woken him in his cabin.
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