A tenth body was recovered on Thursday from the wreckage of the ferry which sank off the coast of Kyrenia, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz said.
“We have learned that the body of another person has been recovered and brought to the surface. After the identification is completed according to administrative procedures, the identity of the recovered body will be shared from the public,” he said at the end of a day-long trip to the island.
With a tenth body having been found, the number of people who remain unaccounted for now stands at 18, with 239 people having been brought to shore alive. Of those people, Yilmaz said that 133 people were initially hospitalised, and that as of Thursday evening, only two of those original 133 remain in hospital.
Those two people, he said, are “not in a critical condition”.
He went on to say that the operation which recovered the tenth body had been personally overseen by Ercument Tatlioglu, the commander of Turkey’s navy, and stressed that in the coming weeks, “efforts will continue, seven days a week, 24 hours a day” to locate and recover the remaining 18 missing people.
Earlier, he had said that Turkey had “utilised all its capabilities” to lead the search-and-rescue efforts since the ferry sank shortly after midday on Sunday, and made reference to a meeting he had held earlier in the day with the families of the missing.
“We shared their pain, and we had the opportunity to listen to their expectations and what they had to say,” he said.
It had initially been expected that he would visit the port, where the families of the missing have been waiting for news of their loved ones’ fate for five consecutive days, but it was later decided that a small number of those waiting would instead be taken to meet Yilmaz at the Turkish embassy in Nicosia.
Around 25 people boarded the bus, with the authorities ensuring that at least one family member of each of the 19 missing was on board before it departed for Nicosia.
Yilmaz was joined at the embassy by Turkish ambassador in Nicosia Ali Murat Basceri. He later visited Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman, before returning to the north’s Ercan (Tymbou) airport with the north’s ’prime minister’ Unal Ustel, where he announced the finding of the tenth body.
Ustel also spoke at the airport, and began his remarks by making reference to the collision of two commercial ships off the coast of Silivri, west of Istanbul, in the sea of Marmara.
“We hope that those who remain missing, both here and there, are found soon,” he said, before saying that with the assistance offered by Turkey in the efforts to locate those missing after the ferry disaster, “once again, the Turkish Cypriot people was made to feel that it is not alone in this world”.
“At times like this, words fail us. This was a complete show of brotherhood. The Republic of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus are two brother states, and from the very first instant, the Republic of Turkey was by our side,” he said.
Like Yilmaz, he said that search-and-rescue efforts “will continue, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, in the air, at sea, and in the depths below the sea where efforts are ongoing at the site of the ferry”.
He also said that investigations are ongoing, both into the conduct of those involved, and at a technical level, saying that “nine people, including the captain, the entire crew, and a shareholder of the ferry’s operating company are before the judiciary”.
Additionally, he made a brief reference to Erhan Arikli, his now former ‘transport minister’ who he dismissed yesterday, and who is widely expect to withdraw his party the YDP’s support for the ruling coalition.
“Of course, there will be attacks, and questions will be asked, and we are ready to listen … However, now is not the time to play politics,” he said.
While Ustel and Yilmaz were speaking at the airport, a five-person delegation from the YDP, led by the party’s second representative in the Turkish Cypriot legislature Talip Atalay, was visiting the new port of Kyrenia, where the families of the missing have waited for five consecutive days for news of their loved ones.
Arikli was not among the delegation.
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