Ship with 1,400 sinks in Red Sea

CAIRO, Egypt (CNN) -- An aging Egyptian passenger ferry loaded to near capacity with about 1,400 people and dozens of vehicles sank Friday in the Red Sea, an official said.

Egyptian maritime officials told state-run Nile TV that 100 survivors had been rescued. At least 15 bodies have been recovered, Egyptian officials said.

The ferry was carrying 1,310 passengers and a crew of 104, according to Egyptian Minister of Transport Mohamed Loutfy Mansour.

Nile TV said the passengers included at least 115 foreigners, 99 of them Saudis.

The ferry -- the Al Salam Boccaccio 98 -- left Dubah, western Saudi Arabia, en route to Egypt's southern port of Safaga, a spokesman for the El Salam Maritime Transport Co. told CNN.

The Al Salam Boccaccio 98 disappeared at midnight (5 p.m. Thursday ET) from radar screens in the Red Sea off the Saudi coast, spokesman Adel Shoukri said from Cairo.

Mansour, the Egyptian transport minister, said that at the time the ferry disappeared, the seas were high and the weather was bad with high winds.

Egypt's state news agency MENA said another ferry in the area received a distress call from Al Salam Boccaccio's captain who said the his ship was in danger of sinking, Reuters reported. MENA did not mention how the second ferry reacted reacted to the message.

Adel Shukri, head of administration at the Cairo headquarters of el-Salam Maritime Navigation, said coastal stations did not receive a SOS message from the crew, Reuters reported.

Mansour said four frigates and a navy destroyer converged on the site, about 57 miles from Hurghada, where they joined a search-and-rescue effort. Hurghada is off Egypt's north-central Red Sea coast, below the Sinai Peninsula. (Map of the area)

The Egyptian government has called their Saudi counterparts in the port of Jedda to seek help, Mansour said.

The U.S. and British militaries said they were sending assistance. The U.S. Navy Central Command headquarters in Bahrain contacted the Egyptian government offering help, and Egypt accepted.

The 35-year-old liner had been due to arrive at Safaga at 3 a.m. local time, the officials added.

Rear Adm. Mahfouz Marzouk, head of the Suez Port Authority, said a collision along the congested waterway could not have been to blame.

"It is not possible because we covered all these areas with radar," he told CNN. "If it were something like that, of course, we would have another ship or a distress signal or something like that. We didn't pick up any contact by wireless communication or by radar."

It was not immediately clear what caused the ferry to sink.

"Maybe, when we succeed (in retrieving) some of the survivors, they'll tell us what happened," he added.

Families returning home

Most of the those on board were believed to be Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia. Others were pilgrims who had overstayed their visas when the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca ended.

CNN's Ben Wedeman said that it was the end of the mid-term break in Egyptian schools and some of those aboard were families of Egyptian workers living in Saudi Arabia returning at the end of the break.

Wederman said there was a record of fatal accidents in that part of the Red Sea. He said that in 1991 more than 500 people were killed when a ferry hit a coral reef outside the same Egyptian port.

David Osler, of Lloyd's List, told CNN while it was too early to speculate on the cause of the ship's disappearance, the vessel was a roll-on roll-off ferry -- a design known to suffer stability problems.

"Once a small amount of water gets on board it can set up an uncontrollable rocking that causes rapid capsize," he said.

He said safety standards in the developed world had improved markedly in the after the Pride of Free Enterprise sank at Zeebruge, Belgium, in 1987, killing 193 passengers.

"This vessel was pensioned off from Italy. It may have been overloaded," he said.

The ship is owned by the Egyptian firm El-Salaam Maritime Transport Co.

A company spokesman said the ship was certified to carry passengers until 2010 and was fully compliant with maintenance regulations.

The ship, which was built in 1970 and flies a Panamanian flag, was involved in a collision in 1999, he said.