Bahrain rescue efforts continuing

Search efforts continued today in Bahrain for two passengers missing since the capsizing of a small cruise boat, in which 57 people drowned, most of them Indians and Britons.

Of the 126 people aboard, 67 were rescued after the boat, the Al-Dana, capsized on Thursday night in fair weather less than half a mile off the coast of the island nation on the western shore of the Persian Gulf.

Colonel Tariq Al-Hassan, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said today that the national Coast Guard and air force were combing beaches and had deployed divers and helicopters in the search effort.

The captain of the boat, an Indian national, remained in custody as the investigation continued into the incident, Al-Hassan said, but provided no additional information on its findings.

The two-deck vessel began to list dangerously when it made a sharp turn. Some survivors said it was overcrowded. Others claimed it was unstable.

The dead included 21 Indians and 15 British people among the patchwork of construction industry executives from 16 countries who were celebrating progress on a pair of skyscrapers.

Britain sent a nine-person team of foreign-service officers and Red Cross staffers to Manama on Friday to work with the embassy “to provide all the comfort and support the families need over the coming days and weeks”, British embassy spokeswoman Karen Williams said.

Al-Hassan told a news conference on Friday night that 140 people were aboard the Al-Dana when dinner was served while it was docked at the harbour. Fourteen of them disembarked before the vessel sailed.

The death toll from other nations was: five South Africans, five Filipinos, four Pakistanis, four from Singapore and one each from Ireland, Germany and South Korea.

The only American aboard the vessel, a civilian woman working for the US Navy base in Bahrain, survived.

South Africa-based construction firm Murray & Roberts Group said in a statement that “more than 50 senior employees from various companies working on the World Trade Centre Project have been lost”.

The dead included the project’s chairman, David Evans, 56, a Briton; and project director Will Nolan, 50, also British, the website said.