A boy and girl trapped in a sinking South Korean ferry with hundreds of other high school students tied their life jacket cords together, a diver who recovered their bodies said, presumably so they wouldn’t float apart.
The diver had to separate the two because he could not carry two corpses up to the surface at the same time.
“I started to cry thinking that they didn’t want to leave each other,” he told the KyunghyangShinmun newspaper on the island of Jindo on Thursday, near where the overloaded ferry went down last week.
The parents of the boy whose shaking voice first raised the alarm that an overloaded ferry was sinking believe his body has also been found, the coastguard said.
The parents had seen his body and clothes and concluded he was their son, but he has not been formally identified.
More than 300 people, most of them students and teachers from the Danwon High School, are dead or missing presumed dead after the April 16 disaster. The confirmed death toll on Thursday was 171.
The Sewol ferry, weighing almost 7,000 tons, sank on a routine trip from the port of Incheon, near Seoul, to the southern holiday island of Jeju. Investigations are focused on human error and mechanical failure.
