World News
Eight die after a ferry capsizes off Kyrenia with 267 aboard
By Staff Writer | 31 August 2026
The interior ministry in Ankara put 259 passengers and eight crew on the vessel, which began taking on water fifteen minutes out of port. The captain and eight crew members have been detained while the cause is examined.
Eight people died on Sunday when a catamaran ferry capsized in the sea off the northern coast of Cyprus, a quarter of an hour into a crossing to the Turkish mainland. The interior ministry in Ankara said 259 passengers and eight crew members were aboard when the vessel began taking on water. It was running from the port of Kyrenia, also known as Girne, to Tasucu in Mersin province, a route worked daily in the summer.
Counts of the rescued moved through the afternoon and the two accounts available at the end of it do not agree. The Turkish Cypriot prime minister, Unal Ustel, said 237 people had been taken from the water and that a search was under way for another 22. A later account put the number still unaccounted for at seventeen. Neither figure has been reconciled with the other and both are given here as the snapshots they are.
So far, we have reached 244 people
Tufan Erhurman, the Turkish Cypriot leader
What the search is working against
Erhurman said the vessel went down in water 1,640 feet deep, about 500 metres, which makes any approach to the hull a specialist operation rather than a diving one. Accounts of how far offshore it sank also differ, one putting it at about four nautical miles and one at roughly six kilometres. Video from the scene, carried on both accounts read for this report, shows passengers in life jackets sitting on the overturned hull and others in the water around it, waiting to be reached.
The mayor of Kyrenia, Murat Senkul, said the vessel belonged to the ferry operator Filo Denizcilik and went down off Diana beach. He described the situation as very serious while the rescue was still running.
We hope we'll be receiving positive news
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey
Two accounts of the weather
Nobody has established a cause, and the two senior figures who have spoken about the conditions describe them differently. Ustel said the ferry faced adverse weather and that a call for help was issued shortly after it began taking on water. Erhurman said conditions were not bad and urged against speculating about what had happened.
The captain has been detained. One account says he was arrested along with eight other crew members who had been aboard when the vessel left Kyrenia; the other says police detained eight people in all, the captain among them, on the prime minister's account. Investigations are continuing and no findings have been published.
Assistance offered from the south
The government of the Republic of Cyprus said through its spokesman, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, that it had made its readiness to help known and would contribute with every available means, and that it had the resources and the operational capacity to do so immediately.
At such times, the protection of human life is paramount
Konstantinos Letymbiotis, Cyprus government spokesman
What is left is an ordinary short sea crossing that ended within sight of the harbour it had left, with a full passenger list aboard and no explanation yet on the record. The questions that follow a loss of this kind are the survey and maintenance history of the hull, the loading condition on departure, the decision to sail, and whether the operator and the port authority hold records that answer any of them. None of that has been published, and until it is, the count of those still missing is the only figure that will move.