Death toll from capsized China ship rises to 65, families demand answers

The death toll from a cruise ship that capsized on China’s Yangtze River has risen to 65, state television has reported, as grieving families broke through a police cordon to march to the site seeking answers. Another 39 bodies were recovered overnight, CCTV said on its microblog on Thursday as more than 370 people were still missing. Only 14 survivors, including the captain, have been found since the ship, Eastern Star, carrying 456 people capsized in a freak tornado on Monday night, in what could be China’s worst shipping disaster in almost 70 years.

The ship sank in a very short time frame, so there could still be air trapped in the hull.

Li Qixiu, of the Naval University of Engineering

About 50 family members, frustrated by the paucity of information coming from authorities, hired a bus to make the eight-hour journey from Nanjing to Jianli county in Hubei, where the ship sank. The protesters later broke through a cordon of 20-25 paramilitary police who had tried to stop them at a roadblock. June 4 marks the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and any sort of protest is strongly discouraged by China’s stability-obsessed leaders.

Yangtze river Asia-Pacific