Twenty-first body recovered after ferry sinking off Kyrenia

Kyrenia, Cyprus. A twenty-first body has been recovered from the sea off Kyrenia following the sinking of a passenger ferry on August 30, Turkish Cypriot leader Unal Ustel said on Monday. Search operations are continuing, while examinations and procedures to identify the body remain underway.

Search and identification efforts

Ustel, the Turkish Cypriot “prime minister”, said that “from the very moment the disaster occurred, the state has mobilised all its resources to locate all the missing individuals, and operations have continued without interruption”.

Two other bodies were recovered over the weekend. A body found last Tuesday was identified as 43-year-old Ferdi Torer.

Torer had travelled to Cyprus on holiday in August with his daughter Nisa and his sons Yunus and Yusuf. They were returning to their native Turkey aboard the ferry.

Yunus and Yusuf reached shore alive, but Nisa died. Her funeral was held on September 1. The children’s mother, Gunes Torer, died of cancer in 2022.

Claims of an earlier accident

Last Thursday, Turkish Cypriot “transport minister” Faiz Sucuoglu suggested that the ferry had been involved in a “minor accident” during the summer that had not been reported.

“This is the information we received. Of course, the police have many more details. It had a minor accident and this was not reported,” he told Kibris Postasi TV.

He later asked, “what fault does Turk Loydu have here?”, referring to the company that certified the ferry as seaworthy in June.

However, when the nine people held in custody in connection with the sinking appeared in court in Kyrenia the following day, a police representative said that “no such evidence has been found”.

Repairs examined in court

A previous court hearing was told that a crack had appeared on the side of the ferry almost two months before it sank. According to photographs recovered from the first mate’s mobile phone, repairs were carried out on June 17.

The repairs were undertaken by the ferry’s captain, Mustafa Oz, and its crew. The court heard on Friday that the work took place at a port in Cyprus, but the Turkish Cypriot authorities were not informed, despite Oz and the ferry’s operating company, Filo Denizcilik, being obliged to notify them under such circumstances.