At least 18 people died and two dozen others were missing after a large ferry sank in the southern Philippines early Monday, the country’s Coast Guard said.
The M/V Trisha Kerstin 3, a cargo and passenger ship, was carrying 332 passengers and 27 crew members when it sank shortly before 2 a.m. near the island of Baluk-baluk in Basilan Province, the Philippine Coast Guard said in a statement. Rescuers saved 317 people, but 24 were still missing as of Monday afternoon.
“The boat suddenly tilted,” Alnajer Muarip, a survivor, told local community radio in Basilan. He was traveling with his pregnant wife and daughter, a toddler.
“I lost them when the boat went down,” he said. “They had vests, I wasn’t wearing one.”
Jun Guro, an attorney who said he did not know how to swim, was among the survivors.
“We were floating for almost four hours,” he told the radio station. “I hope there will be an investigation, because the weather was fine. We sank even though there was no typhoon.”
The ferry was sailing from Zamboanga, the country’s third-largest city, to Jolo Island in Sulu Province, a journey of just under 100 miles, the Coast Guard said. It was carrying fewer than the maximum number of passengers allowed, the agency added. The authorities are investigating the cause of the accident.
Maritime accidents are common in the Philippines, an archipelago made up of over 7,600 islands, most of them uninhabited or sparsely populated, with a total population of over 110 million people.
Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.
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