ZAMBOANGA (Philippines), July 7: More than 200 people were rescued from a blazing ferry off the southern Philippines on Thursday with officials refusing to rule out a militant attack.
All 222 passengers and crew of the 10,709-ton Princess of the World were evacuated on life rafts in a huge emergency operation involving rescue boats, helicopters and US seacraft, leaving a smouldering hulk in the Sulu Sea.
The cause of the blaze was unknown, but officials did not rule out the possibility the ferry had been attacked.
Last year more than 100 poeple died when a ferry was firebombed in Manila Bay in an attack claimed by Muslim Abu Sayyaf guerillas.
The Princess of the World caught fire around noon north of the port city of Zamboanga where the Abu Sayyaf are known to operate.
The vessel, owned by the Filipino shipping firm Sulpicio Lines, was carrying 109 crew members, 108 passengers and five anti-terror sea marshals, the coastguard said.
The government had ordered all passenger vessels to carry sea marshals after the Manila Bay attack.
Asked about the possibility of Thursday’s fire being caused by an attack, navy spokesman Captain Geronimo Malabanan said: “As of now, I don’t want to speculate on that.”
“We have sent two patrol craft to assist the coast guard in the operations. We have no word on casualties yet,” he told AFP in Manila.
Coastguard vessels carrying firefighting equipment reached the stricken ship by mid-afternoon, said the district coastguard commander in Zamboanga, Alejandro Flora.
He said the authorities were “not ruling out” any cause of the fire, including terrorism.
“There are no reports of casualties. All the passengers and crew were rescued and they are being attended to at the moment,” Flora said.
Commodore Rufino Lopez, Navy chief in the southern Philippines, said US troops stationed at the military’s southern command were helping in the rescue effort.
“The Americans are helping and they have deployed speedboats and the Philippine Air Force has deployed two helicopters,” Lopez said.
The vessel was heading to Zamboanga from Manila by way of the central port of Iloilo when it caught on fire, the coast guard said.
“We haven’t heard of any casualties,” said military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Tutaan, adding that those rescued had been taken to the nearby port of Siocon.
Pirates and Abu Sayyaf guerillas are known to ply the waters around the Zamboanga peninsula and have in the past hijacked foreign vessels and kidnapped their crew members.
Passenger ferries are the backbone of transportation in the Philippines, an archipelago made up of hundreds of islands.
The country has a long list of ferry disasters. At least 4,000 people were killed when an inter-island ferry collided with an oil tanker off the central island of Mindoro in 1987.—AFP