Passenger and eyewitness accounts on Monday began to tell the story of the sinking of a passenger ferry off the coast of Kyrenia the previous day, with multiple passengers saying that the boat’s captain was asked to turn back to port as it began to take on water, but that he had refused to heed those calls.

The captain himself told the Turkish Cypriot Kyrenia district court that “waves broke the front off the boat”, but others who were aboard offered differing versions of events.

One passenger who was being treated at northern Nicosia’s Dr Burhan Nalbantoglu hospital told Turkish opposition New Party deputy leader Ali Mahir Basarir, who travelled to the island after the ferry sank, that the captain had been told to turn back before the boat sank.

“We told him to stop. We were telling him so much to stop. He did not stop. It was already clear when we were going, the boat was flying into the sky and landing back on the sea. We told him to stop and he did not stop,” she said.

Later, local boat owner Mustafa Koc told Turkish television channel NTV that far from being the last off the sinking ferry, as is maritime tradition, the captain had in fact been the first person to get off when the boat as it began to sink.

His company typically offers boat tours from Kyrenia’s old port, but with storms having hit the island on Saturday, he did not offer any. However, he said, when informed of the ferry’s situation, “we went straight out with our own tour boat without wasting time”.

“We saw the boat listing sideways on the way. There were about 80 or 90 people. The people on the boat were in a good condition. We somehow approached and tied ourselves to it,” he said.

Then, he added, “we took about 60 or 65 passengers with us and left them at the new port where the ambulances were”.

He said, among his passenger load was the ferry’s captain.

“The captain of the boat got off first. I had the captain on board my boat. I took him. I also had the first mate,” he said.

He also made reference to rumours that the ferry may not have been seaworthy, with it having been stated in court that it had been crashed 12 years ago.

These rumours were also alluded to by Turkish television channel Sozcu TV reporter Ismail Kucukkaya, who said that a technical report written about the boat in 2018 had raised issues regarding its seaworthiness, when Turkey’s Hatay municipality was considering buying it.

He said that a report found that the boat had been built “to carry passengers on lakes instead of on the open sea”, and that “the structure and the stability of the boat were not suitable for sea conditions”, though it was said in court earlier in the day that the ship was technically capable of sailing through waves of a maximum height of three metres.