IGOUMENITSA – Search and rescue have stopped looking for 10 missing people, all thought to be lorry drivers, in the wreck of a ferry which caught fire on its way from Greece to Italy Friday morning, the coast guard confirmed. On Sunday the body of one missing person was found, while a 21-year-old Belorussian truck driver was rescued alive.

  Grimaldi Lines, the Italian company who runs the ship, originally said that all on board had been rescued. The company has since talked of as many as 14 missing, of which five have been detected on board and whose rescue attempt is underway. Among the missing, Grimaldi confirmed to La Presse news agency, there are three Italians.

 Two people who were stuck in the ship’s hold, one from Turkey and one from Bulgaria, were rescued by firefighters. The Bulgarian man is suffering respiratory problems.

 The fire began at 4:12 a.m. on the garage level of the Euroferry Olympia. The ship’s captain immediately ordered an evacuation and although most of the 239 passengers and 51 crew members managed to escape on lifeboats, there were initially some 12 people confirmed missing. Authorities at the port of Corfu said they had counted and identified 277 rescued people, one of whom was not on the official list of passengers.

 At the time of the fire, the ferry was about nine miles from the coast, just north of Corfu, well within the Greek search and rescue area. The first to arrive at the scene were five boats from the Greek coast guard, who contacted the port authorities in Rome to coordinate the operation. Three helicopters and a Greek military ship also arrived in the area.

 "There were very high flames, on board there was panic," explained witnesses, as reported in Italian media. Mino Roma, an entrepreneur from Brindisi, said, "on the lifeboats there were people screaming and vomiting. There were moments of panic. I don't wish it on anyone."

 "There were also children. It was cold and the lifeboats were flooding because they were overloaded," Roma said.

 Felice Lodovico Simone Cicchetti, commander of an Italian patrol boat  who took part in the rescue operation, said to ANSA, "when the fire broke out, the captain went around the cabins and gathered the passengers on a single deck, then they abandoned ship - but the evacuation was not easy or simple."

 "It is difficult to understand the exact dynamics of what happened just yet," explained Paul Kyprianou, a spokesperson for Grimaldi said in an interview with RaiNews24.

 The 83-metre-long Euroferry Olympia was launched in 1995 and has the capacity to carry 560 passengers, 153 commercial vehicles including trucks and trailers, and 32 passenger vehicles.

 In the same area eight years ago, another ferry, the Norman Atlantic rented by Visemar to Anek Lines, caught fire on the night of Dec. 28, causing over 30 deaths. The trial that ensued revealed that the flames had originated from a lorry in the ship's garage, the same starting point authorities suspect for Friday's fire. In the case of the Norman Atlantic, the cold room had not been connected to the electrical plugs of the ferry, but was instead powered by the diesel engine. This practice is prohibited by navigation rules, but, as some emails exchanged between the captain and the owner demonstrate, it was often used on board.

ln