Ship Spotted Off Indonesia Isn’t Endangered Ferry

Hopes of finding a missing ferry with nearly 500 people aboard were dashed Saturday after a sighting of the ship turned out to be false.

A patrol boat located what its crew thought was the ferry, loaded with Christians fleeing religious violence in the Moluccas, off an islet north of the provincial capital, Manado, on the island of Sulawesi.

But a fly-over by the Indonesian navy turned up nothing.

“We spotted a ship from the air, but it wasn’t the missing ferry,” Cmdr. Djoko Sudaryono, head of the search-and-rescue operation, said after returning from a reconnaissance flight.

Searchers were checking other unconfirmed sightings and claims, including one from Christian clergymen that Muslim extremists had hijacked the vessel.

“Anything is possible. We are still looking,” Sudaryono said.

Shipping disasters with large losses of life are common in Indonesia, a nation of about 17,000 islands. Captains often overload their poorly maintained vessels to maximize profits.

As time passes and hope of finding survivors fades, the search has assumed an increasingly tense and desperate tone.

Sudaryono said he planned to call off his operation if nothing was found today. Contact with the ship was lost Thursday soon after its captain radioed that it was taking on water in stormy seas 1,440 miles northeast of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

The ferry was on a 200-mile voyage to Manado from the Molucca Islands, a corner of the Indonesian archipelago where violence between Muslims and Christians has killed nearly 3,000 people of both faiths in the last 18 months.

Local maritime officials reported that the ferry was overloaded with nearly twice the number of passengers it was licensed to carry. They presumed it went down soon after the distress call.

But rescuers were puzzled that they have found no debris or other signs of a sinking.