31 PEOPLE DIED IN FERRY FIRE IN SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES

Thu 30 March 2023:

Up to 31 people have died after a ferry carrying about 250 passengers and crew caught fire in the southern Philippines.

The Coast Guard Commodore Rejard Marfe confirmed that 28 people had drowned or died in the blaze

However, Jim Hataman, governor of Basilan, the southern island province near where the ferry caught fire, said 31 people had died.

Search and rescue efforts are continuing for at least seven missing passengers.

The ship’s captain ran the vessel aground as the fire raged in hopes that more passengers could jump overboard and swim to safety, according to Commodore Rejard Marfe, a coastguard district commander.

31 people died in ferry fire in southern Philippines

The MV Lady Mary Joy 3 caught fire off Baluk-Baluk Island, some 885 kilometres south of Manila, at around 11 pm on Wednesday pic.twitter.com/8uubAfBjc5

— INDEPENDENT PRESS (@IpIndependent) March 30, 2023

The MV Lady Mary Joy 3 caught fire off Baluk-Baluk Island, some 885 kilometres south of Manila, at around 11 pm on Wednesday (1500 GMT).

Emergency teams found 18 burned bodies inside the ferry, Marfe said.

“The bodies were found in different parts of the vessel and they were all burned,” he told dpa. “Emergency teams are still searching the ferry.”

The bodies of 10 other victims who drowned were recovered from the waters off Baluk-Baluk Island, he added.

A total of 195 passengers and 35 crew members were rescued from the MV Lady Mary Joy 3, including nine who were injured and taken to hospital.

Ferry fire in southern Philippines kills at least 31 pic.twitter.com/neWpqImGfU

— INDEPENDENT PRESS (@IpIndependent) March 30, 2023

Marfe said the ship’s manifest showed only 240 people on board the vessel, but there were coastguard personnel and Philippine army soldiers who boarded the ferry that were not in the manifest.

“We are checking on this now to determine if there are missing passengers,” he said.

The cause of the fire was still unclear, but some survivors said it started from the air-conditioned cabins of the vessel, Marfe said.

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.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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