Death toll in China cruise ship capsizing hits nearly 400

Disaster teams searched the Yangtze River on Saturday for dozens of missing bodies from the Eastern Star cruise ship as the death toll in its capsizing rose to nearly 400, making it China's deadliest boat disaster in nearly seven decades.

Authorities have attributed the overturning of the ship late Monday to sudden, severe winds, but also have placed the captain and his first engineer in police custody.

Passengers' relatives have raised questions about whether the ship should have continued its cruise after the storm started in a section of Hubei province and despite a weather warning earlier in the evening.

The death toll rose to 396 after hundreds of bodies from the Eastern Star were found Friday night and Saturday, including that of a 3-year-old girl in the top deck, officials said.

Hu Kaihong, the vice director-general of the press bureau of the State Council Information Office, told a news conference that 46 people were still missing, and that authorities had requested that river traffic and others along the river alert them if they noticed any floating bodies.

Hu said authorities were increasing their efforts to search for the missing and had expanded the target area from the middle reaches of the Yangtze more than 600 miles downstream to Shanghai. The boat had more than 450 people aboard, many of them elderly tourists, for a cruise from Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing.

Reports citing witnesses said the 250 feet and 2,200-ton ship overturned in under a minute, and weather officials said a freak tornado hit the area at the time. The vessel was cited for safety infractions two years ago, according to a notice by the Nanjing Maritime Bureau, but no further details have been given about the state of the ship.

Investigators will probe the ship's structure for flaws, state broadcaster CCTV said, after the ruling Communist party's all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee vowed to leave "no doubts remaining" about the disaster.

Fourteen people survived, including three pulled out by divers from air pockets in the overturned hull on Tuesday. Disaster teams put chains around the hull and used cranes to roll the banged-up, white and blue boat upright and then gradually lift it out of the gray currents of the Yangtze on Friday. Forensic teams are using DNA matching to identify the remains, but haven't said how long the process would take.

On Saturday night, relatives were taken by bus to an area just upriver of the now-righted ship, where they burned incense and tossed flowers into the Yangtze in memory of the dead.

The Eastern Star disaster became the country's worst since the sinking of the SS Kiangya off Shanghai in 1948, which is believed to have killed anywhere from 2,750 to nearly 4,000 people.

China's deadliest maritime disaster in recent decades was the Dashun ferry, which caught fire and capsized off Shandong province in November 1999, killing about 280 people.

Meanwhile, a TV station, Jiangsu Satellite, canceled the popular dating show "If You Are the One" and the rest of its entertainment shows on Saturday for three days because it was "in deep mourning," it said. 

Wire services