World

JINDO/MOKPO, South Korea — Some relatives of the more than 200 children missing in a sunken South Korean ferry offered DNA swabs on Saturday to help identify the dead as the rescue turned into a mission to recover the vessel and the bodies of those on board.

The Sewol, carrying 476 passengers and crew, capsized on Wednesday on a journey from the port of Incheon to the southern holiday island of Jeju. Thirty-two people are known to have died.

The 69-year-old captain, Lee Joon-seok, was arrested in the early hours of Saturday on charges of negligence along with two other crew members, including the third mate who was steering at the time of the capsize.

Prosecutors later said the mate was steering the Sewol through the waters where it listed and capsized — for the first time in her career.

Asked why the children had been ordered to stay put in their cabins instead of abandoning ship, Lee, apparently overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, told reporters he feared they would have been swept out to sea in the strong, cold current.

Early reports said that the ferry turned sharply and listed, perhaps due to a shift in the cargo it was carrying and crew members said the captain, who was not initially on the bridge, had tried to right the ship but failed.

Some 500 relatives of the 270 people listed as missing watched a murky underwater video shot after divers reported they had seen three bodies through the windows.

The official number of those missing was revised up from an earlier estimate of 269.

Packed in a gymnasium in the port city of Jindo day and night since Wednesday, tempers frayed and fist fights broke out after the video was shown. The video, viewed by relatives and journalists, did not appear to show any corpses.

“Please lift the ship, so we can get the bodies out,” a woman who identified herself as the mother of a child called Kang Hyuck said, using a microphone.

Relatives have criticised what they say is the slow response of the government and contradictory information given out by authorities in the early stages of the rescue mission.

Chances of finding survivors ‘almost zero’

President Park Geun-hye was jeered by some when she visited on Thursday. “Park Geun-hye should come here again,” Kang Hyuck’s mother said.

Three cranes were moved close to the sunken ship on Saturday but were not deployed. Strong tides and rough weather again impeded efforts to get inside.

Coastguard spokesman Kim Jae-in said the cranes would be deployed when the divers say it is safe.

“Lifting the ship does not mean they will remove it completely from the sea. They can lift it two to three metres off the seabed,” he said.

Coastguard officials said that divers would make another attempt to enter the ship in the evening.

“The chances of finding anyone alive now are almost zero,” said Bruce Reid, chief executive officer of the International Maritime Rescue Foundation.

“There will still be a search operation on the water, a surface search, but it would be more of a recovery exercise now. They’ll be looking for bodies.”

The capsize occurred in calm weather on a well-travelled 400km sea route from Incheon to Jeju some 25km from land.

Lee, the ship’s captain, was described by officials from Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd., the owner of the vessel, as a “veteran”.

“I had ordered [passengers] to leave the ferry, but [later] I said to them to stay because there was no rescue ship,” he told South Korean television as he was led away by police.

Police also raided Chonghaejin offices in Incheon and Yang Joong-jin, a prosecutor in the city of Mokpo, said ten people were being questioned over the loading and stowing of the Sewol’s cargo.

Yonhap news agency said 180 vehicles were onboard the ferry along with 1,157 tonnes of freight. At least some of the freight was in containers stacked on the foredeck.

Relatives and friends of the schoolchildren have also gathered at the Danwon High School in the commuter town of Ansan.

The vice-principal of the school, Kang Min-gyu, 52, was one of those rescued as the children followed orders and stayed aboard. He hanged himself outside the gym in Jindo, police said.

His body was discovered on Friday and police released part of a two-page suicide note.

“Burn my body and scatter my ashes at the site of the sunken ferry,” he wrote. “Perhaps I can become a teacher for the missing students in my next life.”

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia — The current underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, focused on a tight 10km circle of the sea floor, could be completed within a week, Australian search officials said on Saturday.

Malaysia said the search was at a “very critical juncture” and asked for prayers for its success.

A US Navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean floor for signs of the plane, which disappeared from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.

After almost two months without a sign of wreckage, the current underwater search has been narrowed to a small area around the location in which one of four acoustic signals believed to be from the plane’s black box recorders was detected on April 8, officials said.

“Provided the weather is favourable for launch and recovery of the AUV and we have a good run with the serviceability of the AUV, we should complete the search of the focused underwater area in five to seven days,” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an e-mail.

Officials did not indicate whether they were confident that this search area would yield any new information about the flight, nor did they state what steps they would take in the event that the underwater search were to prove fruitless.

More than two dozen countries have been involved in the hunt for the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar shortly into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight in what officials believe was a deliberate act.

Weeks of daily sorties have failed to turn up any trace of the plane, even after narrowing the search to an arc in the southern Indian Ocean, making this the most expensive such operation in aviation history.

“It is important to focus on today and tomorrow. Narrowing of the search area today and tomorrow is at a very critical juncture,” Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a media conference in Kuala Lumpur, asking for people to pray for success.

Malaysia was asking oil companies and others in the commercial sector to provide assets that might help in the search, Hishammuddin added, after earlier saying more AUVs might be used.

Drone goes deeper than ever before

After almost two weeks without picking up any acoustic signals, and long past the black box battery’s 30-day life expectancy, authorities are increasingly reliant on the $4 million US Bluefin-21 drone, which on Saturday was expected to have dived to unprecedented depths.

Because visual searches of the ocean surface have yielded no concrete evidence, the drone, with its ability to search deep beneath the ocean surface with “side scan” sonar, has become the focal point of the search 2,000km northwest of the Australian city of Perth.

The search has thus far centred on a city-sized area where a series of “pings” led authorities to believe the plane’s black box may be located. The current refined search area is based on one such transmission.

After the drone’s searches were frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which returns it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5km, authorities have adjusted the mechanism and have sent it as deep as 4,695 metres, a record for the machine.

But hopes that it might soon guide searchers to wreckage are dwindling with no sign of the plane after six deployments spanning 133 square kilometres. Footage from the drone’s sixth mission was still being analysed, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Saturday.

On Monday, the search coordinator, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the air and surface search for debris would likely end by midweek as the operation shifted its focus to the ocean floor.

But the air and surface searches have continued daily, and on Saturday the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would help with the Saturday’s search covering about 50,200 square kilometres across three areas.

“The search will always continue,” Hishammuddin said. “It’s just a matter of approach.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) –– The career-focused social network LinkedIn announced Friday it has 300 million members, with more than half the total outside the US.

"While this is an exciting moment, we still have a long way to go to realise our vision of creating economic opportunity for every one of the 3.3 billion people in the global workforce," said LinkedIn vice president Deep Nishar in a blog posting.

Nishar said that for future growth, the company believes it will be more important to get people using the network on mobile devices.

"We know mobile is critical," he said.

"Later this year, we are going to hit our mobile moment, where mobile accounts for more than 50 per cent of all global traffic. Already, our members in dozens of locations including Costa Rica, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, use LinkedIn more on their mobile devices than on their desktop computers."

LinkedIn has its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, and is available in more than 200 countries.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn launched a Chinese language version, attempting to tap the huge market while navigating a strict censorship regime that has seen other foreign social media giants banned.

"Our goal is to connect the more than 140 million Chinese professionals with each other and the global workforce," Nishar said.

In China, LinkedIn allows users to post public comments, but unlike its English-language counterpart it does not currently allow group discussions.

The social network launched in 2003 allows members to create professional circles that help their career path, and allows employers and recruiters to locate people with needed skills.

The company went public in 2011 with one of the hottest public offerings in the sector at the time. Its share price has jumped to $175.42 from the IPO price of $45.

GENEVA — Russia and Ukraine sat down Thursday for Western-backed talks on the escalating crisis in the former Soviet republic as Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the authorities in Kiev of dragging the country towards the abyss.

In a dramatic worsening of tensions in the restive east, three pro-Moscow separatists were killed in an overnight gunbattle with Ukrainian troops in the southeastern port city of Mariupol.

The violence highlighted the urgency of the talks, which bring together the foreign ministers of Russia, the United States, the European Union and Ukraine, as scores of pro-Kremlin separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow have taken over parts of the former Soviet republic’s southeast.

Russia, which has tens of thousands of troops stationed on its border with Ukraine, denies backing the militants and has warned Kiev not to use force against them, saying it reserves the right to protect the many Russian speakers in the country.

“Only through dialogue, through democratic procedures and not with the use of armed forces, tanks and planes can order be imposed in the country,” Putin said from Russia in televised comments timed to coincide with the start of talks.

“I hope that they [participants in talks] manage to understand towards what abyss the Kiev authorities are going, dragging with them the whole country.”

Kiev launched a much-hyped military operation against separatists earlier this week, but it ended in failure when the insurgents humiliated Ukrainian troops by blocking them and seizing six of their armoured vehicles, to the obvious joy of many of the Russian-speaking locals.

NATO promptly announced it was deploying more forces in eastern Europe and urged Russia to stop “destabilising” Ukraine, which has been in turmoil since the ouster of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in February and now threatens to split between its EU-leaning west and Russian-speaking east.

Decisive four-way showdown  

The situation in Ukraine has emerged as the biggest East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Each side comes to the talks armed with a very specific set of demands, in what is likely to make negotiations between Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine’s Andriy Deshchytsya, US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton very tough.

Washington and Kiev aim to get Moscow to demobilise the militias, and the United States warned Moscow on Wednesday that it risked fresh sanctions unless it made concessions.

But Moscow categorically denies having dispatched elite special forces to Ukraine to stir unrest, despite Kiev intelligence saying the same Russian agents who oversaw the seizure of Crimea last month are now coordinating the unrest in the southeast.

Instead, Russia blames Kiev’s interim leaders for pushing the country dangerously close to a civil war.

Moscow refuses to see Kiev’s government — installed by Ukraine’s parliament in February after the overthrow of Yanukovich following months of protests — as legitimate. 

‘Consequences’ if talks fail  

The United States and European Union have already imposed punitive sanctions on key Russian and Ukrainian political and business officials, including members of Putin’s inner circle.

But if the meeting ends in failure, Western countries are prepared to slap Moscow with tougher, broader economic and financial sanctions meant to hurt its already struggling economy.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that the United States was “actively preparing” new sanctions against Russia, with signs growing that Washington may be ready to target the country’s key mining, energy and financial sectors.

US President Barack Obama specifically accused Moscow of supporting separatist militias.

“Each time Russia takes these kinds of steps that are designed to destabilise Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, there are going to be consequences,” Obama told CBS News.

In the meantime, the situation on the ground in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.

In Mariupol, where the three separatists were killed, a further 63 were detained out of around 300 insurgents who attacked an interior ministry base using guns and petrol bombs.

The army unit that lost six armoured vehicles to militants on Wednesday was formally disbanded as Kiev’s military reeled from its disastrous attempt to oust separatists.

The events in Ukraine’s southeast are disturbingly similar to the situation in the Crimean peninsula before it was annexed by Russia last month.

In a statement on Thursday, Ukraine’s interior minister said Russian cell phones had been seized from some of the people arrested in Mariupol.

PERTH, Australia — The hunt by a mini-submarine for a Malaysian airliner in the uncharted depths of the Indian Ocean — the latest phase in a huge international search — will end in about a week, Australia says.

If the best leads now being pursued to locate wreckage from the Boeing 777 prove fruitless, said Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the search would not be abandoned but enter a new phase.

The US Navy’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Bluefin-21 is the newest tool deployed in the hunt, after satellite data and electronic signals from the plane’s black box helped narrow the search area.

But the unmanned torpedo-shaped sonar mapping device is operating at the extreme limit of its range, and has twice had to cut short its mission.

“We believe that [sub] search will be completed within a week or so,” Abbott told Thursday’s Wall Street Journal in an interview as the device mapped the seabed 2,000 kilometres off the western Australian city of Perth.

“If we don’t find wreckage, we stop, we regroup, we reconsider.”

The AUV Thursday completed its first full mission at the third attempt, officials said, and was readying to dive again. Data it retrieved was being analysed.

The first two part-completed missions failed to produce any results.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The cause of its disappearance, after being diverted hundreds of kilometres off course, remains a mystery. No debris has been found despite an enormous search involving ships and planes from several nations.

“My determination for Australia is that we will do whatever we reasonably can to resolve the mystery,” Abbott said.

“If the current search turns up nothing, we won’t abandon it, we will simply move to a different phase,” he was quoted by the Journal as saying, reiterating his confidence that searchers were looking in the right place.

After more than three weeks of listening for signals from the black box flight recorder, the sub was deployed for the first time on Monday night but aborted the mission after breaching its 4,500-metre operating limit.

An unexplained technical problem cut short the second mission, raising questions about the whole search, which is expected to be further complicated by thick silt on the seabed.

The Bluefin is being deployed from the deck of the Australian vessel Ocean Shield, which has led the search.

Before Abbott’s comments the US navy estimated it would take the Bluefin-21 “anywhere from six weeks to two months to scan the entire search area”.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) has repeatedly called for patience and warned the search will be a long, laborious process.

“Bluefin-21 has searched approximately 90 square kilometres to date and the data from its latest mission is being analysed,” JACC said.

JACC chief Angus Houston has stressed that the mini-sub cannot operate below 4,500 metres and that other vehicles would have to be brought in to cope with greater depths.

Experts have said these could include remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that can go as deep as six kilometres.

An ROV was used to pluck the flight data recorders of Air France 447 from the bottom of the Atlantic in 2011.

Houston had announced Monday the end of listening for electronic pulse signals from the black box and the launch of the submarine operation.

The mini-sub is supposed to conduct a sonar survey of the ocean floor for 16 hours at a time. The dive itself takes two hours as does re-surfacing.

Houston has described the detection of the electronic pulses, last heard more than a week ago, as the best lead in the hunt for the plane.

An oil slick had also been sighted in the search area, he said Monday, and was taken ashore by sea for testing to see whether it came from the plane.

JACC said Thursday the oil sample had arrived in Perth for analysis.

Experts stress that the search area is a dark, extremely deep and little-known seascape and a daunting prospect.

“It has not been mapped — in fact most of the deep ocean has not been mapped,” said Charitha Pattiaratchi, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia.

“It is very cold and dark with high pressures — 450 times that at the surface.”

The visual search for debris also continued Thursday, JACC said, with as many as 12 aircraft and 11 ships involved over an area of 40,349 square kilometres more than 2,170 kilometres northwest of Perth.

MOKPO/JINDO, South Korea — Rescuers struggled with strong waves and murky waters on Thursday as they searched for hundreds of people, most of them teenagers from the same school, still missing after a South Korean ferry capsized 36 hours ago.

Coastguard, navy and private divers scoured the site of the accident, about 20km off the country’s southwestern coast.

Earlier, rescue teams hammered on the hull of the upturned, mostly submerged vessel, hoping for a response from anyone trapped inside, but they heard nothing, local media reported.

The vessel, carrying 475 passengers and crew, capsized on Wednesday during a journey from the port of Incheon to the holiday island of Jeju.

Coastguards recovered five more bodies late on Thursday, raising the death toll to 14 people. Another 179 passengers have been rescued, leaving 282 unaccounted for and possibly trapped in the vessel.

One parent, Park Yung-suk, told Reuters at the port of Jindo, where rescue efforts are centred, that she had seen the body of her teenage daughter’s teacher brought ashore.

“If I could teach myself to dive, I would jump in the water and try to find my daughter,” she said. Her daughter was one of 340 children and teachers from the Danwon High School in Ansan, a Seoul suburb, on board the vessel.

The captain of the ship, Lee Joon-seok, 69, faces a criminal investigation, coastguard officials said, amid unconfirmed reports that he was one of the first to jump to safety from the stricken vessel.

One official said authorities were investigating whether the captain had indeed abandoned the vessel early and one of the charges he faced was violating a law that governs the conduct of shipping crew.

Shallow waters, but dangerous 

Many survivors told local media that Lee was one of the first to be rescued, although none actually saw him leave the ship. The coastguard and the ferry operator declined comment.

Although the water at the site of the accident is relatively shallow at under 50 metres, it is still dangerous for the 150 or so divers working flat out, experts said. Time was running out to find any survivors trapped inside, they said.

“The chances of finding people in there [alive] are not zero,” said David Jardine-smith, secretary of the International Maritime Rescue Federation, adding, however, that conditions were extremely difficult.

“There is a lot of water current and silt in the water which means visibility is very poor and the divers are basically feeling their way around.”

The government said it was not giving up on the possibility of finding survivors, while the coastguard also turned its attention to what may have caused the disaster in calm seas.

“Today, we began looking into the cause of the submersion and sinking ... focusing on any questions about crew negligence, problems with cargo holding and structural defects of the vessel,” senior coast guard official Kim Soo-hyun said.

There has been no official explanation for the sinking, although officials denied reports the ship, built in Japan 20 years ago, was sharply off its authorised route.

Although the wider area has rock hazards and shallow waters, they were not in the immediate vicinity of its usual path. 

Safety deficiencies

The ferry was found to have three safety deficiencies in 2012, including one related to navigation, but passed subsequent safety checks in 2013 and 2014, according to international and Korean shipping records.

The ferry’s capacity was increased to more than 900 people from 800 when it was imported from Japan in late 2012, shipping sources said, but the expansion passed all safety tests. The ship, its passengers and cargoes are all under two separate insurances, according to industry sources.

State broadcaster YTN quoted investigation officials as saying the ship was off its usual course and had been hit by a veering wind which caused containers stacked on deck to shift.

The vessel was listing heavily to one side on Wednesday as passengers wearing life jackets scrambled into the sea and waiting rescue boats.

It sank within about two hours and witnesses and media showed that two life rafts from the ship successfully inflated and launched. Earlier reports said just one had inflated.

The operator, Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd., based in Incheon, came under sharp criticism after its officials, for the second day, avoided many questions posed about the conduct of the captain and crew.

The unlisted operator, which owns four other vessels, reported an operating loss of 785 million won ($756,000) last year.

A company called Web Solus is providing an underwater drone free of charge to examine the interior of the vessel where survivors could be located.

“Families and rescuers have been just looking at the surface of the sea. We have to move fast and at least see some of the vessel under the water,” Ko Se-jin, the operator, told Reuters.

Among those on the ship were two Chinese citizens, according to Chinese media, one Russian and two Filipinos. The Philippines citizens were safe, according to Korean authorities, but the whereabouts of the others were not known.

Hope rests on whether passengers inside had been able to find air pockets, Jardine-smith said. “It is not impossible that people have survived, but, tragically, it’s very unlikely that many will have done.” 

PERTH, Australia — The hunt for a missing Malaysian plane suffered another setback Wednesday when a second seabed search by a mini-submarine was cut short due to “technical” troubles after the first also aborted in very deep water.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) issued a brief statement which spoke of an unspecified “technical issue” with the unmanned Bluefin-21 sonar device.

The first mission which began Monday night aborted automatically after breaching the machine’s maximum operating depth of 4,500 metres.

But there was no explanation for what caused the interruption of the second mission, which began Tuesday night, or how long it lasted.

“The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Bluefin-21, was forced to resurface this morning to rectify a technical issue,” JACC said.

“Bluefin-21 was then redeployed and it is currently continuing its underwater search.”

Before the device was put in the water for the third time, data had been downloaded from the vehicle while on the deck of the Australian vessel Ocean Shield, which has led the search for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

“Initial analysis of the data downloaded this morning indicates no significant detections,” JACC said.

The Bluefin’s first mission, cut short after just six of an intended 16 hours mapping the seabed with sonar, had also drawn a blank.

After more than three weeks of hunting for black box signals, the autonomous sub was deployed for the first time on Monday night.

The US navy explained that the Bluefin-21 had automatically aborted its first mission after six hours upon breaching its maximum operating depth.

JACC added that it had “exceeded its operating depth limit of 4,500 metres and its built-in safety feature returned it to the surface”.

The sub was undamaged and had to be re-programmed, said US Navy Captain Mark Matthews.

“In this case the vehicle’s programmed to fly 30 metres over the floor of the ocean to get a good mapping of what’s beneath,” he told CNN from Perth after the aborted dive.

“It went to 4,500 metres and once it hit that max depth, it said ‘This is deeper than I’m programmed to be’, so it aborted the mission.”

Two months to scan area 

Questions were raised about how deep the seabed may be in the search area.

JACC chief Angus Houston has stressed that the AUV cannot operate below 4,500 metres and that other vehicles would have to be brought in to cope with greater depths.

“There are vehicles that can go a lot deeper than that,” he said Monday. “They are usually much larger vehicles; they do recovery as well and obviously those sorts of possibilities will be looked at... they are being looked at as we speak.

“But a lot will depend on the outcome of what we find when we go down and take a look,” said Houston, who has not revealed what has been seen so far.

He had announced Monday the end of listening for signals from the plane’s black box flight recorders and the launch of the submarine operation.

The mini-sub is supposed to conduct a sonar survey of the silty ocean floor for 16 hours at a time, looking for wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines flight which mysteriously disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The US Navy has estimated it would take the Bluefin-21 “anywhere from six weeks to two months to scan the entire search area”.

The area has been narrowed down using satellite data and the detection of electronic pulses from the black box which were last heard more than a week ago.

Houston has described those detections as the best lead in the hunt for the plane, and added Monday that an oil slick had also been sighted in the search area.

It would take several days to test a sample of the oil ashore, but Houston said he did not think it was from one of the many ships involved in the hunt.

The cause of the plane’s disappearance, after being diverted hundreds of kilometres off course, remains a mystery. No debris has been found despite an enormous search involving ships and planes from several nations.

The visual search for debris also continued Wednesday, JACC said, with as many as 14 aircraft and 11 ships involved over an area of 55,151 square kilometres more than 2,000 kilometres northwest of Perth.

JINDO, South Korea — South Korean rescue teams, including elite navy SEAL divers, raced Wednesday to find nearly 300 people missing after a ferry sank with 459 on board, mostly high school students bound for a holiday island.

Lee Gyeong-og, the vice minister of security and public administration, said 164 people had been rescued, leaving 292 “unaccounted for”. His office said there were three confirmed deaths, including a female crew member and a student.

There are fears that the final death toll will be high, after the 6,825-tonne ship listed sharply, capsized and finally sank all within two hours of sending a distress signal at 9:00am (0000 GMT).

“I’m afraid there’s little chance for those trapped inside to still be alive,” said one senior rescue team official, speaking by phone from the scene.

Dramatic television aerial footage showed terrified passengers wearing life jackets clambering into inflatable boats as water lapped over the rails of the vessel as it sank 20 kilometres off the southern island of Byungpoong.

Some could be seen sliding down the steeply inclined side of the ferry and into the water, as rescuers, including the crew of what appeared to be a small fishing boat, struggled to pull them to safety.

Several rescued passengers said they had initially been ordered to stay in their seats, before the ferry suddenly listed to one side, triggering panic.

Told ‘not to move’ 

“The crew kept telling us not to move and to stay seated,” one male survivor told the YTN news channel.

“Then it suddenly shifted over and people slid to one side and it became very difficult to get out,” he added.

Lee’s ministry earlier announced that 368 people had been rescued — a mistake it attributed to conflicting information from multiple sources.

Of the 429 passengers on board the ferry bound for the popular southern resort island of Jeju, more than 300 were students travelling with 14 teachers from a high school in Ansan just south of Seoul.

Among those confirmed as rescued, 78 were students.

“I feel so pained to see students on a school trip... face such a tragic accident. I want you to pour all your energy into this mission,” President Park Geun-hye said on a visit to the main disaster agency situation room in Seoul.

Many of the survivors were plucked out of the water by fishing and other commercial vessels who were first on the scene before a flotilla of coastguard and navy ships arrived, backed by more than a dozen helicopters.

Lee said 178 divers, including a team of South Korean navy SEALS, were searching the submerged vessel.

“There is so much mud in the seawater and the visibility is very low,” he said, adding that strong currents were also hampering the rescuers.

The US 7th Fleet said an amphibious assault ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard which was on routine patrol west of the Korean peninsula, was being sent to help.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear, although rescued passengers reported the ferry coming to a sudden, shuddering halt — indicating it may have run aground.

The weather was described as “fine” with moderate winds and sea swell.

One local official, who had taken a boat to the site and arrived an hour after the distress signal was sent, said he was “very concerned” about those still missing.

“The ship was already almost totally submerged when I got there. A lot of people must have been trapped,” the official, who declined to be identified, told AFP by phone.

The water temperature was cold at around 12.6^oC.

“I heard a big thumping sound and the boat suddenly started to tilt,” one rescued student told YTN by telephone.

Distraught parents gathered at the high school in Ansan, desperate for news, with some yelling at school officials while others frantically tried to call their children’s mobiles.

“I talked to my daughter. She said she had been rescued along with 10 other students,” one mother told the YTN news channel.

“They said they had jumped into the water before getting rescued,” she said.

Scores of ferries ply the waters between the South Korean mainland and its multiple offshore islands every day, and accidents are relatively rare.

In one of the worst incidents, nearly 300 people died when a ferry capsized off the west coast in October 1993.

JINDO, South Korea — Almost 300 people were missing after a ferry capsized off South Korea on Wednesday, despite frantic rescue efforts involving coastguard vessels, fishing boats and helicopters, in what could be the country's biggest maritime disaster in over 20 years.

The ferry was carrying 459 people, of whom 164 have been rescued, coastguard officials said.

It was not immediately clear why the Sewol ferry listed heavily on to its side and capsized in apparently calm conditions off South Korea's southwest coast, but some survivors spoke of what appeared to be an impact prior to the accident.

"It was fine. Then the ship went 'boom' and there was a noise of cargo falling," said Cha Eun-ok, who said she was on the deck of the ferry taking photographs at the time.

"The on-board announcement told people to stay put ... people who stayed are trapped," she said in Jindo, the nearest town to the scene of the accident.

Survivors there huddled on the floor of a gymnasium, wrapped in blankets and receiving medical aid. One woman lay on a bed shaking uncontrollably. A man across the room wailed loudly as he spoke on his mobile phone.

Furious relatives of the missing threw water at journalists trying to speak to survivors and at a local politician who had arrived at the makeshift clinic.

Most of the passengers on board the ferry appeared to have been teenagers and their teachers from a high school in Seoul who were on a field trip to Jeju island, about 100 km (60 miles) south of the Korean peninsula.

CONFUSION OVER NUMBER MISSING

An official from the Danwon High School in Ansan, a Seoul suburb, had earlier said all of its 338 students and teachers had been rescued. But that could not be confirmed by the coastguard or other officials involved in the rescue.

The school official asked not to be identified.

The Ministry of Security and Public Administration earlier reported that 368 people had been rescued and that about 100 were missing.

But it later described those figures as a miscalculation, turning what had at first appeared to be a largely successful rescue operation into potentially a major disaster.

There was also confusion about the total number of passengers on board, as authorities revised the figure down from 477, saying some had been double counted. It added to growing frustration and anger among families of the passengers.

Witnesses said many people were likely to be trapped inside the vessel.

According to a coast guard official in Jindo, the waters where the ferry capsized have some of the strongest tides of any off South Korea's coast, meaning divers were prevented from entering the mostly submerged ship for several hours.

‘LOUD IMPACT’

The ferry began to list badly about 20 km off the southwest coast as it headed for Jeju.

A member of the crew of a local government ship involved in the rescue, who said he had spoken to members of the sunken ferry's crew, said the area was free of reefs or rocks and the cause was likely to be some sort of malfunction on the vessel.

There were reports of the ferry having veered off its course, but coordinates of the site of the accident provided by port authorities indicated it was not far off the regular shipping lane.

Several survivors spoke of hearing a "loud impact" before the ship started listing and rolling on its side.

Within a couple of hours, the Sewol was lying on its port side. Soon after, it had completely turned over, with only the forward part of its white and blue hull showing above the water.

Coastguard vessels and fishing boats scrambled to the rescue with television footage showing rescuers pulling passengers in life vests out of the water as their boats bobbed beside the ferry's hull.

Other passengers were winched to safety by helicopters.

The ferry left from the port of Incheon, about 30 km (20 miles) west of Seoul, late on Tuesday.

It sent a distress signal early on Wednesday, the coastguard said, triggering a rescue operation that involved almost 100 coastguard and navy vessels and fishing boats, as well as 18 helicopters.

A U.S. navy ship was at the scene to help, the US Seventh Fleet said, adding it was ready to offer more assistance.

The area of the accident was clear of fog, unlike further north up the coast, which had been shrouded in heavy fog that led to the cancellation of many ferry services.

The coastguard said one person was found dead inside the sinking ferry. An official from the Mokpo Hankook hospital on the mainland said another person died soon after arriving at its emergency ward. That person was identified as one of the students on the school trip.

Four people were confirmed dead in total.

The ship has a capacity of about 900 people, an overall length of 146 metres (480 feet) and it weighs 6,586 gross tonnes. Shipping records show it was built in Japan in 1994.

In 1993, the Seohae ferry sank, and 292 of the 362 passengers on board perished.

KIEV/KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Ukrainian armed forces on Tuesday launched a “special operation” against militiamen in the country’s Russian speaking east, authorities said, recapturing a military airfield from pro-Moscow separatists.

Gunfire could be heard from the airfield at the town of Kramatorsk after a fighter jet swooped low over the area. Ukrainian troops were seen disembarking from helicopters.

A Reuters correspondent in Kramatorsk saw four military helicopters over the airport. Two of these landed and when troops stepped out and walked across the field, locals manning a barricade shouted “Shame! Go back home!”

Ukraine’s acting president Oleksander Turchinov had earlier announced that a military operation was under way to flush pro-Russian separatists out of the government buildings and facilities they have seized in about 10 towns and cities in the east over the last few days.

Turchinov issued a statement saying Ukraine had retaken the airfield in Kramatorsk from pro-Russian militants, while the state security service said an “anti-terrorist” operation was in progress against separatists in the nearby town of Slaviansk.

The operations appeared to mark an escalation of the deepest East-West crisis since the Cold War. The standoff has raised fears in the West and in Kiev that Russia might intervene militarily on behalf of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, following its annexation of the Crimean region last month in response to the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, after weeks of protests.

Earlier, pro-Russian militants who had been holed up in the Kramatorsk police headquarters since Saturday left the building — but a state security official in Kiev said separatists had then taken over the agency’s offices in the town.

Shares fall

The reports of military action in eastern Ukraine caused Russian shares to fall sharply, with the main Moscow indices down about 3 per cent.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave a gloomy assessment, apparently referring to the deaths of at least two people on Sunday when Kiev unsuccessfully tried to regain control in Slaviansk, about 150km from the Russian border.

“Blood has once again been spilt in Ukraine. The country is on the brink of civil war,” he said on his Facebook page.

Turchinov said an offensive he first announced on Sunday was now in progress after days in which it failed to materialise.

“The anti-terrorist operation began during the night in the north of Donetsk region. But it will take place in stages, responsibly, in a considered way. I once again stress: the aim of these operations is to defend the citizens of Ukraine,” he told parliament.

At least 15 armoured personnel carriers displaying Ukrainian flags were parked by the side of a road around 50km north of Slaviansk, witnesses said.

Ukrainian troops wearing camouflage gear and armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers were stationed nearby, with a helicopter and several buses containing interior ministry personnel near the road.

In Slaviansk itself, separatists have seized the local headquarters of the police and state security service.

Barricades

Outside the police station about a dozen civilians manned barricades of tyres and wooden crates. A dozen or so armed Cossacks — paramilitary fighters who claim descent from Tsarist-era patrolmen — stood guard at the mayor’s offices. Shops were functioning as usual and bread supplies were normal.

In Kiev, a radical pro-Russian candidate running for Ukrainian presidential elections due next month was beaten up by an angry crowd.

Moscow accuses Kiev of provoking the crisis by ignoring the rights of citizens who use Russian as their first language, and has promised to protect them from attack. Russia also stresses the presence of far-right nationalists among Kiev’s new rulers.

However, a United Nations report on Tuesday cast doubt on whether Russian-speakers were seriously threatened, including those in Crimea who voted to join Russia after Moscow forces had already seized control of the Black Sea peninsula.

“Although there were some attacks against the ethnic Russian community, these were neither systematic nor widespread,” said the report by the UN human rights office.

Russia called the report one-sided, politicised and apparently fabricated.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen accused Moscow of involvement in the rebellions. “It is very clear that Russia’s hand is deeply engaged in this,” he told reporters.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denied that Moscow was stirring up the separatists in the east and southeast as a possible prelude to repeating its annexation of Crimea. “Ukraine is spreading lies that Russia is behind the actions in the southeast,” Lavrov said on a visit to China.

Moscow has demanded constitutional change in Ukraine to give more powers to Russian-speaking areas, where most of the country’s heavy industry lies, while the rebels have demanded Crimean-style referendums on secession in their regions.

Kiev opposes anything that might lead to the dismemberment of the country. But in an attempt to undercut the rebels’ demands, Turchinov has held out the prospect of a nationwide referendum on the future shape of the Ukrainian state.

Reverse flows

The crisis has also prompted fears that Moscow might turn off gas supplies to Kiev, disrupting flows to the European Union. Russian exporter Gazprom promised it would remain a reliable supplier to the EU, but German energy company RWE began deliveries to Ukraine on Tuesday — reversing the usual east-west flow in one central European pipeline.

Central Europe’s pipeline network is designed to carry Russian gas westwards. But Polish operator Gaz-System said it had reversed the flow to send back 4 million cubic metres per day, the equivalent of 1.5 billion annually — a modest volume compared with Ukraine’s need for more than 50 billion.

Moscow has nearly doubled the price it charges Kiev this year, and President Vladimir Putin has threatened to halt supplies if Kiev does not repay more than $2 billion it owes to Gazprom. Putin has also warned EU leaders that this could disrupt their supplies that flow across Ukraine.

Ukrainian state energy company Naftogaz said it was ready to pay in full for imported gas from Russia at $268.5 per 1,000 cubic metres, rather than the $485 Moscow has demanded, which is more than it charges rich Western countries for its gas.