Ferry disaster vice principal commits suicide
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THE vice principal of a South Korean high school who accompanied hundreds of pupils on a ferry that capsized has committed suicide, police said yesterday, as hopes faded of finding any of the 274 missing alive.
The Sewol, carrying 476 passengers and crew, capsized on Wednesday on a journey from the port of Incheon to the southern holiday island of Jeju.
Kang Min-gyu, 52, had been missing since Thursday. He appeared to have hanged himself with his belt from a tree outside a gym in the port city of Jindo where relatives of those missing, mostly children from the school, were gathered.
Police said Kang did not leave a suicide note and that they had started looking for him after he was reported missing by a fellow teacher. He was rescued from the ferry after it capsized.
A total of 28 people had been officially declared dead before Kang’s suicide, while 174 had been rescued. Most of the missing are students from Danwon High School on the outskirts of Seoul, who were on holiday.
The government revised the total number of passengers and number of people rescued, saying there had been further inaccuracies in tabulation, without elaborating.
Divers are fighting strong tides and murky waters to get to the sunken ship. The chance of finding anyone alive is slim.
At the high school in Ansan, an industrial town near Seoul, friends and family of the missing gathered in silence.
“When I received the call telling me the news, at that time I still had hope,” said Cho Kyung-mi, who was waiting for news of her missing 16 year-old nephew. “And now it’s all gone.”
In the classrooms of the missing, students have left messages on desks, blackboards and windows, asking for the safe return of their friends.
“If I see you again, I’ll tell you I love you, because I haven’t said it to you enough,” one read.
Investigations into the sinking, South Korea’s worst maritime accident in 21 years based on possible casualties, have centered on possible crew negligence, problems with cargo stowage and structural defects, though the ship appears to have passed all of its safety and insurance checks.
Its 69-year-old captain has also come under scrutiny after witnesses said he was among the first to escape the vessel that was on a 400-kilometer voyage to Jeju. According to investigators, Captain Lee Joon-seok was not on the bridge at the time the Sewol started to list sharply, with a junior officer at the wheel.
Prosecutors yesterday issued arrest warrants for Lee, the officer at the wheel and another crew member for failing in their duty to aid passengers.
“I’m not sure where the captain was before the accident. But right after, I saw him rushing back into the steering house ahead of me,” said Oh Young-seok, a helmsmen who was off duty at the time.
“He calmly asked by how much the ship was tilted, and tried to re-balance it,” said Oh, who was speaking from a hospital bed in Mokpo, where the injured have been taken.
Divers gained access to the cargo deck of the ferry yesterday, though that was not close to the passenger quarters, according to a coastguard official.
“We can’t even see the ship’s white color. Our people are just touching the hull with their hands,” Kim Chun-il, a diver from Undine Marine Industries, told relatives of the missing.
The ferry went down in calm conditions and was following a well traveled route in familiar waters.
Lee has not commented on when he left the ship, though he has apologized for the loss of life. He was described as an industry veteran by officials from Chonghaejin Marine Co, the ship’s owner, and others who had met him described him as an “expert.”
“I don’t know why he abandoned the ship,” said Ju Hi-chun, a maritime author who interviewed Lee in 2006 as an expert on the route to Jeju island.
“(But) Koreans don’t have the view that they have to stay with their ship until the end. It is different from the West,” he said.
Some reports claim the vessel turned sharply, causing cargo to shift and the ship to list before capsizing. Marine investigators and the coastguard have said it is too early to pinpoint a cause for the accident and declined to comment on the possibility of the cargo shifting.
The record of the ferry owner is also under investigation and documents were removed from its headquarters in Incheon.
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