A thirteenth body has been recovered from the wreck of a passenger ferry which sank off the coast of Kyrenia last week, Turkish Cypriot ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel said on Saturday.
He said the body, which belongs to a woman, will now be sent to northern Nicosia’s Dr Burhan Nalbantoglu hospital to be identified.
The number of people who remain unaccounted for after last Sunday’s accident now stands at 15, with the families of those who remain missing waiting for news outside the entrance to the new port of Kyrenia for the seventh consecutive day.
Ustel on Saturday promised that “search operations, involving all the relevant units, are continuing seven days a week, 24 hours a day, to locate the missing persons”, and offered his thanks to the Turkish army, navy, and air force, “who have contributed to the search efforts with great dedication and determination”.
“All our teams are continuing their efforts with the same determination, sensitivity, and dedication to reach our missing,” he said.
On Friday, Mehmet Baybars Kucukatay, the Turkish navy’s southern field commander, said that on Friday, there were a total of nine ships and 11 aircraft taking part in the operation, supported by a team of 800 people.
“We will continue searching at the bottom of the sea, underwater, above water, and on the coastline in the region,” he said, before making special reference to the remotely operated underwater vehicle which has been deployed by the Turkish deep-sea research ship the TCG Alemdar to search the sea floor.
The vehicle, known as the “Rov”, is capable of grasping submerged objects with a maximum mass of 135 kilograms and bringing them to the surface at a maximum depth of 3,000 metres below the surface of the sea, with the ferry itself having sunk to a depth of 554 metres, according to Kucukatay.
Earlier, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz had visited Cyprus on Thursday, and said that of the 133 people who were initially hospitalised on Sunday after being brought to shore alive following the accident, only two remain in hospital.
Those two people, he said, are “not in a critical condition”.
