10 dead after fishing boat capsizes in South Korea; survivors clung to boat for 10 hours before being found
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 06 September, 2015, 11:29am
UPDATED : Sunday, 06 September, 2015, 2:17pm
Reuters, AP and Kyodo in Seoul
A video still shows coastguard officers carrying out a rescue operation after the fishing boat sank near South Korea's Jeju island. Photo: Xinhua
Ten people died and more were missing after a South Korean fishing boat capsized, a coastguard official and media reports said today, as a survivor talked of the harrowing 10 hours spent desperately clinging to the boat before being rescued.
The boat was found capsized earlier this morning after it lost radio contact late on Saturday about 40 minutes after departing from port in Chuja, a coastguard official in the southern island of Jeju said by telephone. Chuja lies between the mainland south coast and Jeju, the official said.
Three people were found holding on to what was left of the 9.7-tonne Dolphin vessel. They were airlifted to hospital where they were treated for non-life-threatening injuries. More than 40 coast guard, navy and civilian ships searched the nearby waters.
A survivor, identified only by the surname Park, awoke to find the captain telling the passengers to get out as the boat filled with water. Park said survivors clung to the boat for more than 10 hours, but some disappeared in the strong waves before rescuers arrived.
Yonhap News Agency quoted a survivor as saying the boat capsized due to strong rolling waves.
It was not clear how many were on board, but most were passengers on a fishing trip, not professional fishermen, one of the coastguard officials said.
Another coastguard official said the boat was initially reported to have taken 18 to 19 people, but an unknown number of others were also believed to be on board.
The passenger list submitted by the ship named 22 people including the captain, but four were not aboard. One of the survivors was not on the list, leading authorities to recalculate the number aboard.
Most of them were on a fishing expedition on Saturday to Chuja, a popular fishing area, the official said.
President Park Geun-hye, heavily criticised over the response to last year’s ferry sinking, ordered her government to “do everything possible for the search and rescue of the missing” and to keep the public informed about government efforts to deal with this accident, according to her office.
In April last year, a passenger ferry, Sewol, sank off the southwest coast killing about 300 people, most of them children on a school outing, triggering a national outrage over what was seen as an ineffective rescue operation.
