Manila, March 31, (dpa/GNA) – The death toll from a ferry fire in the southern Philippines has risen to 29, with seven still missing, the coastguard said Friday.
Eleven people drowned after they jumped overboard, while 18 bodies were recovered from inside the burned MV Lady Mary Joy 3, the coastguard said.
The ferry caught fire on Wednesday evening, forcing the captain to run the vessel aground on Baluk-Baluk Island, some 885 kilometres south of Manila.
Coastguard personnel were scouring the area for the seven missing, Commodore Rejard Marfe, a district commander of the coast guard said.
The ferry was carrying a total of 252 people – 205 passengers, 35 crew members, eight soldiers and four coastguard personnel – on the overnight trip from Zamboanga City to Jolo island, more than 100 kilometres from Baluk-Baluk.
Marfe said 216 survivors were rescued from the fire, down from the initial report of 230 rescued, after the list was consolidated.
An investigation team was on the way to Baluk-Baluk, to determine the exact cause of the fire, which survivors said broke out from the air-conditioned cabins of the ferry, he added.
Sea travel is a major mode of transportation in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands.
The country was the site of the world’s worst peacetime shipping disaster in 1987, when more than 4,000 people died in a collision between a passenger ferry and an oil tanker just before Christmas.
GNA