At least 185 people have been found dead and over 290 others rescued while hundreds remained missing on Friday night from an sunken Egyptian ferry in the Red Sea.

A total of 185 bodies have been recovered by rescue teams so far, said a source in the Red Sea port of Safaga, where the coordinating center of the rescue work led by the Egyptian navy was based. The port is some 600 km southeast of the capital Cairo.

Egyptian Minister of Transport Mohamed Mansour was quoted by the official MENA news agency as saying that 293 people of the al- Salaam 98 ferry have been rescued so far after the ship sank in the Red Sea overnight Friday.

Mansour said that the rescue operation is going on despite the nightfall and rough weather condition.

Hundreds out of over 1,300 passengers have remained missing.

About a thousand relatives of the passengers have gathered in the Safaga port, anxiously waiting for latest news from the rescue teams, said Xinhua correspondents there.

The accident occurred when the ship, with 1,414 people on board, departed from the Dubah port in Saudi Arabia for the Safaga port.

A list of passengers obtained by Xinhua showed that 1,193 Egyptians, 99 Saudis, six Syrians, four Palestinians, one Jordanian, one national of the United Arab Emirates, one Yemeni, one Sudanese, one Indonesian, one Omani, one Canadian and one Filipino were on board the 35-year old cruiser.

The ship, called Al Salaam 98, also carried 104 crew members, 22 cars and 16 trucks.

Both the list and an official from the Chinese Embassy in Cairo confirmed that there were no Chinese citizens on board when the ship capsized.

The ill-fated ferry disappeared from the radar screen shortly after it left Dubah at 7:30 p.m. local time (1630 GMT) on Thursday. It should have arrived at Safaga at 2:30 a.m. (0030 GMT) on Friday.

Egyptian maritime officials said earlier in the day that bodies and lifeboats were spotted on Friday by an Egyptian helicopter near the waters off Safaga, where the ship was last seen on the radar screen.

Officials said bad weather, high winds and rough seas were apparently hampering rescue efforts.

There was no immediate word on the cause of the accident, but it was speculated that the cruiser might have sailed in poor weather.

Egyptian Minister of Transport Mansour said that examinations of the ship in January showed that it met security and safety standards.

Meanwhile, an official at the Safaga port ruled out overloading as a possible cause for the tragedy.

The ferry has a capacity of as many as 2,079 passengers, the official said.

Another official also said that the incident was unlikely to be caused by a collision.

"The area is fully covered by radar systems and we haven't picked up communications about a collision," said the official.

A prosecution team headed by attorney general and counsellor Mohamed Gamal arrived in Safaga earlier in the day and an investigation into the incident was underway.

The ship is owned by the Egyptian company El-Salaam Maritime Transport Co. and most passengers on board are believed to be Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia and pilgrims returning from the Saudi holy city of Mecca.

It is the second time that a cruiser owned by the company suffered a major accident in less than four months.

Al-Salaam 95, a sister ship, carrying about 1,250 Muslim pilgrims back from Saudi Arabia, collided with a Cypriot commercial vessel in the Gulf of Suez on Oct. 17, 2005, killing at least three and injuring dozens of others.

Source: Xinhua