JIANLI, China : Dozens of people broke through a police cordon as they marched towards the site of a sunken cruise ship in the Yangtze River to demand news of missing relatives.
Rescuers searched for more than 400 missing people, many of them elderly, but hopes were fading of finding more survivors from the worst shipping disaster in modern Chinese history. Only 14 people, including the ship’s captain, have been found alive since the ship capsized in a tornado on Monday night with 456 people on board. Just 29 bodies have been recovered.
Frustrated by the scarcity of information coming from local authorities, about 80 family members hired a bus to take them from Nanjing to Jianli county in Hubei, an eight-hour journey. They started walking towards the rescue site late tonight.
“This isn’t going to be much use, we’re just doing this for the government to see,” said organiser Wang Feng. The protesters later broke through a cordon of 20 to 25 paramilitary police who had tried to prevent them from going through a roadblock. In the early hours today, the deputy police chief of Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is the capital, told the relatives they could go to the disaster site only in the daytime.
He promised to arrange buses for them to view the boat in the morning, adding that journalists were barred from going. Volunteers from Jianli offered rides and water to the marchers, and some people tied yellow ribbons to their car wing mirrors. Some of the relatives broke down in tears near the site. Earlier, 47 of the relatives asked the government to release the names of the living and the dead to them at the rescue site, according to a statement. In a separate statement, other relatives questioned why most of the people rescued were crew members, why the boat did not dock, and why the captain and crew members had time to don their life vests but not to sound any alarm.
(AGENCIES)
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