Captain arrested in ferry’s sinking

Cranes wait Friday near the buoys installed to mark the sunken ferry Sewol in the waters off the southern coast near Jindo, South Korea, after the last bit of the vessel’s blue keel disappeared.
Cranes wait Friday near the buoys installed to mark the sunken ferry Sewol in the waters off the southern coast near Jindo, South Korea, after the last bit of the vessel’s blue keel disappeared.

MOKPO, South Korea - The captain of a sunken South Korean ferry was arrested early today on suspicion of negligence and abandoning people in need, as investigators looked into whether his evacuation order came too late to save lives. Two crew members also were arrested, a prosecutor said.

photo

AP

People whose children are missing in the sinking of the Sewol ferry wait in a gymnasium Friday in Jindo, South Korea, watching TV news reports on the missing and the search.

Rescuers planned 40 dives today in an attempt to enter the ferry and retrieve at least some of the more than 270 people missing. A civilian diver saw three bodies inside the ship through windows but couldn’t break the windows, coast guard official Kwon Yong-deok said.

So far, 29 bodies have been recovered since Wednesday’s disaster off the southern South Korea coast.

On Friday, as the last bit of the sunken ferry’s hull slipped beneath the murky water off southern South Korea, there was a new victim: a vice principal of the high school whose students were among the passengers was found hanged, an apparent suicide.

The Sewol had left the northwestern port of Incheon on Tuesday on an overnight journey to the holiday island of Jeju in the south with 476 people aboard, including 323 students from Danwon High School in Ansan. It capsized within hours of the crew making a distress call to the shore a little before 9 a.m. Wednesday.

By Friday night, the ship’s blue keel, which had been visible above the water since the ferry sank, had disappeared, and rescuers set two buoys to mark the area. Navy divers attached underwater air bags to the 6,852-ton ferry to prevent it from sinking deeper, the Defense Ministry said.

Strong currents and rain have made it difficult to get inside the ferry, where most of the passengers are believed to have been trapped, coast guard spokesman Kim Jae-in said. The coast guard said divers pumped air into the ship to try to sustain any survivors.

Investigators said the accident happened at a point where the ship had to make a turn, and prosecutor Park Jae-eok said investigators were looking at whether the third mate ordered a turn that was so sharp that it caused the vessel to list.

The sharp turn came between 8:48 and 8:49 a.m., but it’s not known whether it was done voluntarily or because of some external factor, said Nam Jae-heon, a spokesman for the Maritime Ministry.

Another angle being investigated is the role of the captain, 68-year-old Lee Joon-seok.

Senior prosecutor Yang Jung-jin said Lee was detained early today, along with the third mate, a 25-yearold woman identified only by her surname, Park, and helmsman Cho Joon-ki, 55. Lee faces five charges, including negligence of duty and violation of maritime law, and the crew members each face three related charges, according to the Yonhap news agency.

“I am sorry to the people of South Korea for causing a disturbance, and I bow my head in apology to the families of the victims,” Lee said after his arrest, as he left the Mokpo Branch of Gwangju District Court to be jailed.

Yang said earlier that Lee was not on the bridge when the ferry was passing through an area with many islands clustered closely together. Yang said the law requires the captain to be on the bridge in such situations.

“I gave instructions on the route, then briefly went to the bedroom when it [the sinking] happened,” Lee said.

Yang said Lee also abandoned people in need of help and rescue. “The captain escaped before the passengers,” Yang said. Video aired by Yonhap showed Lee among the first people to reach the shore by rescue boat.

A transcript of a ship to-shore radio exchange shows that an official at the Jeju Vessel Traffic Services Center recommended evacuation just five minutes after the Sewol’s distress call. But Oh Yong-seok, another helmsman, said it took 30 minutes for the captain to give the evacuation order as the boat listed.

The captain defended his decision to wait before ordering an evacuation.

“At the time, the current was very strong, temperature of the ocean water was cold, and I thought that if people left the ferry without judgment, if they were not wearing a life jacket, and even if they were, they would drift away and face many other difficulties,” Lee said. “The rescue boats had not arrived yet, nor were there any civilian fishing ships other boats nearby at that time.”

Yang said the other crew members arrested failed to reduce speed near the islands, conducted a sharp turn and failed to carry out necessary measures to save lives.

Cho, the helmsman arrested, accepted some responsibility outside court. “There was a mistake on my part as well, but the steering [gear of the ship] was unusually turned a lot,” he said.

A total of about 10 crew members were being investigated over whether mistakes were made or whether they broke any rules related to cargo, the coast guard said.

Prosecutors will have 10 days to decide whether to indict the captain and crew, but can request a 10-day extension from the court.

Meanwhile, as hope dwindled that any of the 236 missing students from the ferry would be found alive, the high school was stunned Friday by more tragic news - the death of its vice principal in what was suspected to be a suicide.

The vice principal, Kang Min-kyu, 52, of Danwon High School, who survived the ferry accident Wednesday, was found hanging from a tree on a hill near a gymnasium where families of the missing had gathered.

“It’s too much, being alive alone while more than 200 of my students are missing,” he wrote in a note found in his wallet, police said. “Please place all the blame on me because I was in charge of the trip. Please cremate my body and scatter the ashes where the ship sank. Perhaps I should be a teacher for those missing children in the other world.”

On Friday evening, hundreds of students held a candlelight vigil for Kang on the Danwon High School grounds in Ansan, a city south of Seoul.

There have been no survivors found since the day of the sinking, when 174 of the 476 passengers were rescued. The death toll rose to 29 after the body of a woman was recovered, authorities said early today.

The bodies found so far all had life jackets on and weren’t discovered inside the ferry. They might have been trapped under the vessel, the coast guard said.

On Friday, three vessels with cranes arrived at the accident site to prepare to salvage the ferry. But they will not hoist the ship before getting approval from family members of those still believed inside because the lifting could endanger any survivors, said a coast guard officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing department rules.

Experts said that even after they got the approval, it would take days, if not weeks, to complete the difficult task of raising the ship.

On Jindo, angry and distraught relatives watched the rescue attempts. Some held a Buddhist prayer ritual, crying and praying for their relatives.

“I want to jump into the water with them,” said Park Geum-san, 59, the great-aunt of a missing student, Park Ye-ji. “My loved one is under the water, and it’s raining. Anger is not enough.”

Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd, in Incheon, the operator of the ferry, added more cabin rooms to three floors after its 2012 purchase of the ship, which was built in Japan in 1994, an official at the private Korean Register of Shipping said.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter was still under investigation, said the extension work between October 2012 and February 2013 increased the Sewol’s weight by 187 tons and added enough room for 117 more people. The Sewol had a capacity of 921 when it sank.

As is common in South Korea, the ship’s owner paid for a safety check by the Korean Register of Shipping, which found that the Sewol passed all safety tests, including whether it could stabilize in the event of tilting, the official said.

Prosecutors raided and seized materials and documents from the ship’s operator, as well as six companies that had conducted safety checks, revamped the ship or loaded container boxes, a sign that investigators will likely examine the ship’s addition of rooms and how containers were loaded.

Information for this article was contributed by Foster Klug, Youkyung Lee, Hyung-jin Kim and Jung-yoon Choi of The Associated Press; by Cynthia Kim, Sam Kim, Eunkyung Seo, Shinhye Kang, Seyoon Kim and Kevin Costelloe of Bloomberg News; and by Choe Sang-Hun, Su-Hyun Lee and Jiha Ham of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/19/2014

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