On 21 June 2008, the Philippine passenger ferry MV Princess of the Stars capsized and rolled bottom-up off Sibuyan Island, in the waters near San Fernando, Romblon, after sailing from Manila toward Cebu directly into the path of Typhoon Fengshen — known locally by the Philippine name Frank. The death toll is most commonly stated as around 800 or more; roughly 814 people are recorded as dead or missing, against only a few dozen confirmed survivors. It was the worst Philippine ferry disaster of its era and one of the deadliest single maritime losses of the 2000s.
The Princess of the Stars was a large RO-RO ferry of about 23,800 gross tons operated by Sulpicio Lines — the same company associated with the 1987 Doña Paz collision, the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history. On 20 June 2008 she left Manila with well over 800 people aboard, bound for Cebu, even as Typhoon Frank tracked across the central Philippines. As the storm intensified around the vessel the following day, she lost power, was driven toward Sibuyan Island, and capsized in mountainous seas; most of those aboard were trapped inside as she turned turtle.
The Philippine Board of Marine Inquiry (BMI), the fact-finding body convened under the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA), investigated and issued a report dated 25 August 2008. Its central finding was directed at the ship’s master, Captain Florencio Marimon, who was lost with the vessel: that the immediate cause of the capsizing was the master’s failure to exercise extraordinary diligence and good seamanship — an error of judgment in continuing the voyage that brought the ship into harm’s way in the path of the typhoon, when prudent practice, and the conduct of other vessels that sheltered or cancelled, called for keeping clear. The BMI also recommended that MARINA consider suspending Sulpicio Lines’ Certificate of Public Convenience.
The disaster’s legal afterlife was long. The BMI was a fact-finding inquiry, not a criminal court, and the master himself had died; but the question of corporate responsibility ran through the Philippine courts for years, culminating in 2024 in a Court of Appeals ruling that the operator (by then renamed) was guilty of gross negligence and liable for substantial damages to victims’ families. This file states the toll as an estimate — around 800 or more — because, as with several mass-casualty ferry losses, the exact number of people aboard and lost was never established with certainty.
At about 22:12 on 26 September 2000, the Greek passenger ferry MS Express Samina drove onto the Portes islets — a charted reef roughly two nautical miles off the harbour of Parikia, on the island of Paros in the Aegean — at around 18 knots, tore open her hull, and sank within about an hour. Eighty-one people died out of 533 aboard; the toll is sometimes given as 80 or 82, the variation turning largely on whether the harbourmaster who suffered a fatal heart attack during the rescue is counted. The ferry struck a hazard that was marked on every chart of the approach, in worsening but navigable weather, for one elementary reason: there was no one effectively conning the ship.
The Express Samina was an ageing RO-RO ferry — built in 1966, some 34 years old — operated by Minoan Flying Dolphins, which by 2000 dominated Greek coastal shipping. On the night of the sinking she was running under autopilot with no proper bridge watch; crew members, including the first officer, were away from their posts, with witnesses describing officers watching a televised football match as the ship ran on toward Paros. With the autopilot holding a course and no one correcting it, the ferry stood on past the point where she should have altered for the harbour and struck the Portes rocks. The damage was made far worse, and the sinking far faster, because watertight doors that safety rules required to be shut were left open — by most accounts nine of the eleven — so the inrush spread unchecked through the hull.
There was no standing Greek transport-safety board to issue a “probable cause” in 2000; the official reckoning came through the Greek state’s administrative and judicial investigation, conducted under the Merchant Marine Ministry and the courts. The finding was crew negligence. Several crew members were prosecuted and convicted: the first officer, Anastasios (Tassos) Psychoyios, received 19 years, the master, Vassilis Giannakis, 16 years, and others received lesser terms for offences including abandoning the ship without the captain’s order. The company’s managing figure, Pandelis Sfinias, charged in connection with the disaster, died by suicide two months after the sinking.
The Express Samina remains a landmark in European ferry safety because of how avoidable it was — a modern ferry, on a routine domestic run, lost on a charted rock because the bridge was unmanned and the watertight doors were open. It accelerated reforms in Greek shipping: the mandatory fitting of voyage data recorders, the maritime equivalent of an aircraft’s black box, and a reduction of the maximum permitted age of passenger ferries.
On the night of 26 September 2002, the Senegalese state-owned ferry MV Le Joola capsized in a squall off the coast of The Gambia while sailing from Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region, to the capital, Dakar; an estimated 1,863 people died and only 64 survived, making it one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history and, by most reckonings, the worst peacetime shipping loss after the Doña Paz. The ship had been loaded with roughly four times the number of people she was certified to carry, and she was operating outside the coastal zone for which she was licensed. The capsize, when it came, took only minutes.
Le Joola was a roll-on/roll-off passenger ferry built in Germany in 1990, about 79 metres long, owned by the Senegalese state and operated under the responsibility of the country’s armed forces. She was certified for 536 passengers, plus crew, on coastal voyages. On her final sailing she carried an officially recorded total well in excess of 1,900 people — and the true figure was almost certainly higher, because large numbers boarded without tickets. The Casamance region was effectively cut off by land, and the ferry was the lifeline to Dakar; on this run she was packed far beyond any safe limit, with passengers and cargo crowding the upper decks.
The disaster unfolded with terrible speed. Hours out of Ziguinchor, off the Gambian coast and well beyond the coastal limit she was licensed for, Le Joola ran into a violent night squall. Already top-heavy from the masses sleeping on her upper decks — weight high above her centre of buoyancy — she lost stability and capsized, throwing passengers and cargo into the sea within a few minutes. There was no time to launch boats in any order; survival came down to who could reach the surface and cling to the overturned hull or to debris through the night, and a rescue response that did not begin in earnest for many hours sealed the toll. Of the roughly 1,900-plus aboard, only 64 lived.
A Senegalese government Commission of Inquiry examined the disaster and found its causes in the operation of the ship: gross overloading, the absence of a valid sailing licence, operation outside the certified coastal zone, and poor stability worsened by the crowds on the upper decks; it also recorded that only one of the ship’s two engines was functioning and that the crew had not properly consulted the weather before sailing. The official Senegalese closure of the case in 2003 attributed responsibility principally to the captain, who died in the sinking. A separate French judicial inquiry — opened because French citizens were among the dead — indicted several Senegalese officials in 2008 but was ultimately terminated on jurisdictional grounds, and no one has ever stood trial. The Finding here is recorded as Operator: the disaster was caused by the way the state-run ferry was loaded, licensed and dispatched.
In the small hours of 3 February 2006, the Egyptian roll-on/roll-off ferry MS al-Salam Boccaccio 98 capsized and sank in the Red Sea on a crossing from Duba, Saudi Arabia, to Safaga, Egypt. Of roughly 1,400 people aboard, 387 were rescued — including 24 crew — and the rest were lost. The reported death toll is about 1,031; because passenger accounting on the route was imperfect, the figure is best stated as approximately a thousand. The disaster was the worst Egyptian maritime loss in modern history. Its cause, as reconstructed by the flag state’s investigation, was not a single failure but a chain: a fire on the vehicle deck, firefighting water that could not drain because the scuppers were blocked, that trapped water sloshing free across the deck, and ballast operations meant to correct the resulting list that instead deepened it — a compounding loss of stability aboard a ship that was, in the round, unseaworthy.
The vessel carried the design vulnerability common to RO-RO ferries: a long, open vehicle deck with no internal subdivision, on which any accumulation of free water is acutely dangerous to stability. Built in Italy in 1970 as the Boccaccio, she had over her life been lengthened and given additional passenger decks — modifications that raised weight high in the ship. By 2006 she was operating under the Panamanian flag for the Egyptian company El Salam Maritime Transport, classed and statutorily certified by the Italian classification society RINA acting on behalf of the flag state.
The Panama Maritime Authority, as flag state, conducted the official investigation, and the document of record is explicitly a preliminary report: it set out the facts and conclusions reached at that stage and expressly reserved further findings for a final report. Within those limits its reconstruction is the authoritative technical account, and it describes a multi-factor loss in the exact sense — no one of the failures alone would likely have sunk her; their sequence did.
The legal aftermath ran on two tracks. In Egypt, the ship’s owner, Mamdouh Ismail, who had left the country, was acquitted in 2008 and then convicted on appeal in 2009 and sentenced in absentia to seven years, with company employees also convicted. In Italy, court-appointed experts found contributory negligence by RINA for having certified an unseaworthy ship, and the Italian and EU courts ultimately confirmed that the victims’ relatives could pursue RINA in the Italian courts — a landmark on the liability of classification societies.