Chronology The long list of wrecked ferries
This is his honeymoon, he just got married and to celebrate it he decides to take a cruise along the Danish and Norwegian coasts with his wife.
It is April and the landscape is already beginning to take shape in spring
.
Until the smoke just darkened it.
This is a trip with friends.
They are athletes, young people, and they decide that the best way to enjoy themselves is to embark for a few days together to relax and party.
The flames deny it.
This is a visit to your parents to baptize your newborn.
Instead of the highway, a cruise seems like a good option.
A different experience and a calmer trip.
Not this time, the fire has truncated it.
These are only three of the 495 lives - 395 passengers and 100 crew - that the Scandinavian Star carried inside on April 7, 1990 when several intentional fires took
the lives of 159 people
in what the prosecutor in the case would describe as " the crime of the century.
A crime that, even today, 31 years later, still does not have a culprit and is approached by the Filmin
Scandinavian Star
documentary miniseries
, with interviews with survivors, the ship's crew, legal experts and relatives of the victims.
"Even today I can hear the echo of my own voice in the smoke,"
explains one of the surviving travelers, Jan Harasem, who remembers how he can escape between vanished bodies.
But to get to that April 7, 1990, you have to travel to Miami at the end of 1989, its rich inhabitants and its continuous boat parties. In one of them, the Massalia, cameras were placed during one of those celebrations. The images showed that the ship
did not have enough smoke detectors, the security doors were barely working
and getting out of there in case of fire would be very difficult.
That ship, with the Bahamas flag and more than 20 years sailing seas, would end up baptized as the Scandinavian Star when it was bought by businessman
Henrik Johansen
and his company
Vognmandsruten
to make trips between the Norwegian capital, Oslo, and the Danish city of Frederikshavn. A sale surrounded by suspicions, but protected by the tycoon's reputation as an entrepreneur and the financial capacity of
Ole B. Hansen
, CEO of the company.
Thus, 25 days before the tragedy, the cruise ship made the route that separated Miami from the German coast to undergo a review. He arrived there with
a crew of almost 100 people, of whom only 10% spoke English
, with salaries around the current 850 euros and hired at the last minute. Only nine members were from the original Massalia, there were 62 Portuguese, 15 Scandinavians, two Spanish, seven Americans and one Brazilian.
12 days after the start of the routes, accelerated by the company, the ship did not meet quality standards.
The review in the German city of Cuxhaven determined that the Scandinavian Star was not suitable to go out to sea as the fire doors were not good, the magnets were broken, the lifeboats were not compliant ... It was ignored and the The trip would be commanded by Hugo Larsen, an experienced captain in Norwegian and Danish waters.
Ten hours before leaving, the problems grew on the ship with too many cars inside,
bad smell, rats and huge queues in reception
of people complaining because the crew did not know the name or the exact number of people per cabin.
A perfect chaos for what was unleashed at 1.45 at night.
The first fire was at that time and the clients themselves managed to stop it with blankets and towels because there was not even an automatic alarm.
A quarter of an hour later, more fires spread across deck 3 due to the highly flammable melanin resin coating, according to the investigation.
The flames spread across Decks 4 and 5
, cornering customers and crew in the restaurant
and causing a runaway flight between fallen bodies towards the lifeboats, which were not in a position to evacuate the occupants and the crew, who did not even know act because he had not done the previous drill.
The tragedy was already a fact.
To this was added that the captain, Bruno Larsen, in a communication with the rescue team affirmed the following: "Yes, everyone is out of the ship ... Unless we know."
It was not true, while the crew were 160 dead.
Among them,
Erik Mørk Andersen
, who was charged with setting the fires because he had three previous convictions for that reason.
In 2013, a report denied it;
in 2014, the charges were dropped
, and the investigation that pointed to sabotage was reopened.
Seven years later, the investigation remains open and the case unsolved as the families await justice.
"It is impossible to separate reason from rage at the moment," concludes one of them in the documentary.
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