Korea ferry death toll passes 100
JINDO (AFP) — The confirmed death toll from South Korea’s ferry disaster passed 100 yesterday, as dive teams, under growing pressure from bereaved relatives, accelerated the grim task of recovering hundreds more bodies from the submerged vessel.
Improved weather conditions and calm seas spurred their efforts, but underwater visibility was still very poor, requiring divers to grope their way blindly though the corridors and cabins of the ferry that capsized and sank last Wednesday.
Nearly one week into the rescue and recovery effort of one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters, close to 200 of the 476 people who were aboard the 6,825ton Sewol — most of them schoolchildren —are still unaccounted for.
The official toll provided by the coastguard yesterday morning stood at 104, with 198 still missing.
The distraught victims’ families gathered in the morning at the harbour of Jindo island — not far from the disaster site — awaiting the increasingly frequent arrival of boats bearing the most recently recovered bodies.
In the initial days after the Sewol went down, the relatives’ anger was focused on the pace of the rescue effort.
With all hope of finding any survivors essentially extinguished, this has turned to growing impatience with the effort to locate and retrieve the bodies of those trapped.
“I just want my son back,” said the father of one missing student. “I need to be able to hold him and say goodbye. I can’t bear the idea of him in that cold, dark place.”
The disaster has profoundly shocked South Korea, a proudly modernized nation that thought it had left behind largescale accidents of this type.
The sense of national grief has been underwritten by an equally deep but largely unfocused anger that has been vented toward pretty much anyone in authority.
Coastguard officials have been slapped and punched, senior politicians — including the prime minister — pushed and heckled, and rescue teams criticized for their slow response.
If there is a chief hate figure, it is the ferry’s captain, Lee Joon-seok, who was arrested at the weekend and charged with criminal negligence and abandoning his passengers.
Six members of his crew are also under arrest.
On Monday, President Park Geun-hye, who faced a hostile crowd when she met relatives on Jindo last week, described the actions of Lee and his crew as being “tantamount to murder.”