Guyana appoints international team to investigate ferry disaster
Guyana's government has appointed a group of international experts to investigate the sinking of a state ferry that killed dozens of passengers in the country's worst recorded maritime disaster. The 87-year-old MV Barima capsized in Atlantic waters on 18 June after departing the capital, Georgetown, bound for Port Kaituma, an Indigenous community near the Venezuelan border. Authorities believe 179 passengers were aboard. Divers have so far recovered 73 bodies, with another 76 people rescued, and international teams are still working to raise the vessel so that it can be inspected.
President Irfaan Ali said the investigative team has been given wide powers and is expected to operate independently. Phillip Godfrey Smith, formerly attorney general of Belize, was appointed chairman of the five-person panel, which is tasked with establishing whether professional negligence contributed to the loss. The other members include an attorney, a naval architect and maritime experts from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing the panel from outside the country is a deliberate choice in a jurisdiction where the operator was the state itself.
The terms of reference point directly at the practices survivors have described. The team will scrutinise passenger management including embarkation, manifest preparation, the possible overcrowding of the vessel, the storage of cargo, the availability and use of life-saving equipment and adherence to passenger safety requirements. Each of those items concerns the period before the ferry sailed rather than the moments in which she was lost.
Survivors who clung to debris for hours have said the ferry was overloaded with passengers and cargo including vehicles and large pallets, and that the vessel was taking in water, which crews reportedly dismissed as normal. Three people have been arrested, among them the rescued captain, accused of testing positive for marijuana, along with another crew member.
The gap between 179 believed aboard and 149 accounted for is the central unresolved figure, and it depends on a manifest whose reliability is itself under investigation. Ali said the authorities hope the commission will recommend institutional and operational reforms alongside any other measures needed to strengthen maritime safety, improve emergency preparedness and response, and reduce the likelihood of a similar tragedy. For a domestic ferry network of this kind, the value of the exercise lies less in assigning blame for one voyage than in whether the recommendations survive contact with the budgets of the operators expected to implement them.
