At least fifteen people were killed and nineteen others are missing Monday, July 24, after the sinking of a ferry off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
The boat sank with forty people on board just after midnight local time (7 p.m., Sunday in Paris), the local office of the Indonesian search and rescue agency said in a statement. Six people were rescued and taken to hospital for treatment, while the causes of the sinking are being investigated.
“At the moment, nineteen people are still wanted”Muhamad Arafah, head of the local search and rescue agency in the city of Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi, said in a statement. “The research will be carried out in two teams. The first team will dive around the crash site”he specified, “the second team will sweep the surface of the water around the accident site using an inflatable boat and a rowboat”.
Frequent maritime accidents
In Indonesia, it is common for the actual number of passengers on a ship to differ from the ship’s log. Maritime accidents are common in this Southeast Asian archipelago made up of around 17,000 islands, where residents use ferries and small boats to get around despite insufficient safety standards.
In 2018, more than 150 people drowned in the sinking of a ferry sailing on one of the deepest lakes in the world, in Sumatra. In May last year, a ferry carrying more than 800 people ran aground in shallow waters off East Nusa Tenggara province and was stranded for two days before being refloated. No one was injured in this accident.