More than 50 kilometers north of Corfu, rescuers were busy on Saturday to try to find twelve passengers missing for 24 hours in the fire that continues to rage aboard the Italian company Grimaldi ferry.
The ship caught fire at dawn on Friday while en route to Brindisi in Italy, two hours after leaving the Greek port of Igoumenitsa, with at least 290 people on board.
An investigation is underway but the fire could have started from a truck parked in the holds, according to several concordant statements.
280 people rescued Friday
The port of the Greek island of Corfu was calm this Saturday morning, AFP noted.
The 280 people rescued the day before spent the night at the hotel or at the hospital for a dozen of them, suffering from minor injuries or breathing difficulties.
As far as the eye could see, at sea, dozens of rescuers, divers and firefighters were still battling the flames and thick smoke escaping from the Euroferry Olympia, near the islet of Erikoussa, between Greece and Albania.
And, aided by a helicopter, a frigate, six tugboats and a firefighting vessel, rescuers were still trying to find twelve truck drivers who were missing, according to Greek firefighters.
“Some jumped overboard”
"Some of our friends are still missing, we don't know where they are," says a Turkish survivor, Fahri Ozgen, who has taken refuge in a hotel in Corfu.
He tells AFP how the day before on the deck of the ship some "250 people were screaming, shouting, some jumped into the sea" to escape the threatening fire that they felt "under their feet".
Among the missing, seven Bulgarians, three Greeks, a Lithuanian and a Turk, the Greek coast guard told AFP.
Two passengers, a Bulgarian and an Afghan, remained prisoners in the garage, were able to be evacuated from the burning boat on Friday after more than ten hours in thick smoke, before being hospitalized, according to the same source.
The Bulgarian national has “very low oxygen saturation and has been intubated,” Bulgarian Deputy Foreign Minister Velislava Petrova said in a press briefing on Saturday morning.
But the specialized team who had been able to board the ferry on Friday could not stay because of the flames and the infernal heat.
Crowded and poorly ventilated cabins
Several truckers interviewed on Greek television ERT on Saturday reported that some of them preferred to sleep in their trucks rather than in crowded ferry cabins.
The Greek truckers' union denounced, in June 2017, the malfunction of the air conditioning in the cabins of the Euroferry Olympia and the Euroferry Egnazia, two ships of the Grimaldi company, according to the daily Kathimerini.
In a letter to the Greek Ministry of Merchant Marine, quoted by the newspaper, the union also criticizes the poor ventilation of the holds reserved for vehicles.
In accordance with international legislation on navigation, the ferry put into service in 1995 had been subjected to a control visit which "resulted in a positive result" on February 16 in Igoumenitsa, specified the Grimaldi group, in a communicated.
Illegal migrants
In addition, two of the survivors, Afghans, were not on the passenger list, the coast guard told AFP.
Their presence raises fears of other illegal immigrants on the burning ferry.
Migrants often smuggle aboard ferries linking Greece to Italy.
Because of the disaster, other foreign survivors find themselves without money or papers in Corfu.
"We have lost our money, our passports, all our administrative documents, I don't even have any shoes on my feet anymore," laments Turkish driver Ali Duran to AFP.
Maritime ferry connections are frequent between the Greek ports of Igoumenitsa and Patras, to the west, and the Italian ports in the Adriatic Sea, Brindisi or Ancona.
The previous fire on a ferry in this part of the Mediterranean took place in December 2014 on the Norman Atlantic, an Italian ship, which was en route from Patras to Ancona.
It had killed 13 people, including nine passengers.
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