BUDAPEST: A body was pulled from the Danube more than 100 km downstream from Budapest, officials said on Monday, the first apparent victim recovered since the night of a boat crash presumed to have killed 28 people.

South Korean and Hunga­rian divers prepared on Mon­day for an attempt to recover bodies from the wreck of The Mermaid, which sank on Wed­­­nesday carrying 33 Sou­th Korean tourists and two Hungarian crew, in the river’s worst disaster in half a century.

The Mermaid capsized after being struck from behind by a large cruise liner near a bridge in the centre of Budapest.

The bodies of seven South Koreans were recovered on the night of the disaster and seven were rescued alive. Nineteen other Korean passengers and the two crew members have been missing since the accident and presumed dead.

“One dead body, looks like Korean, already found 100 km from here,” the South Korean embassy’s Defence Attache Shun-Keun Song told reporters. Hungarian Police spokesman Kristof Gal said authorities were still try­­­­ing to identify the body and could not yet confirm that it was from The Mermaid.

Many of the bodies are believed to still be trapped inside the wreck, which divers have not been able to reach since the accident because of high flood waters and strong currents. South Korea sent its own recovery team which joined the operation on Monday.

“We are cooperating with Korean colleagues; this is a joint operation now,” Janos Hajdu, the chief of Hungary’s counter-terrorism centre TEK and the leader of the recovery operation on the Hungarian side, told a press conference.

Early on Monday, a Korean diver was being prepared by a team on a barge while South Korean and Hungarian rescue personnel manned several rubber speedboats on the fast flowing river.

“The point of entry is on the barge located at the scene of the accident,” the South Korean rescue team said in a statement. “Today, diving is not about attempting to enter the ship, but for understanding the situation first.”

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2019