Image via Reuters
This story has updated figures, according to the latest news reports.
A South Korean ferry carrying 477 people, most of them high school students, sank off the southern coast on Wednesday, with two reported dead, according to Reuters.
Rescue efforts were still underway, with CNN reporting that 295 were still unaccounted for, and 180 rescued.
“The ferry is almost completely submerged,” Lee Gyeong-Og, the vice minister of security and public administration, said at a briefing in Seoul. He said that 34 naval, coastguard and civilian vessels were involved in the rescue operation, along with 18 helicopters and Navy SEALs.
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AFP reported that 325 of the passengers on the ferry bound for Jeju-do were students from Danwon High School in Ansan, south of Seoul, and that crew comprised the remainder, though other media have reported slightly different numbers.
The ferry left the western port of Incheon on Tuesday evening and a distress signal was sent out by the crew at 9 a.m. Wednesday, about 13 miles off the island of Byungpoong, according to AFP.
One passenger told South Korean media that a “big thumping sound” was heard before the “boat stopped,” suggesting to officials that the ferry may have run aground. Worried parents meanwhile waited for news at the Ansan high school auditorium, desperately trying to call their children.
One mother whose daughter had been rescued told YTN news that she heard passengers apparently “jumped into the water before getting rescued.”
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