A man with a bleeding head, hard to understand and clearly in trouble, was found near Verőce late on Saturday. He turned out to be an Italian national and the first thread in a night that ended with two people dead and five still missing on the Danube.
Budapest Police (BRFK) said on their website on Sunday morning that officers who reached the scene questioned the injured man and decided he had survived a boating accident. Disaster management crews and the Pest County Search and Rescue Service joined them. Drones went up, and teams combed the water and the banks at once.
The first body, a man’s, turned up on the shore south of Verőce. Hours later a woman’s body was found close to the Megyeri Bridge. Searchers also located a wrecked small motorboat.
A hotel boat in the frame
Police established that a hotel boat had been in that stretch of river when the crash happened. It was the MS Heidelberg, and it was stopped at Komárom. The motorboat had struck it.
Eight adults had been on the motorboat. Three men and two women have not been found. According to media reports cited in the Hungarian Conservative, the group were friends and relatives travelling from one party to another, with Vác as their last stop.
On Monday the hotel boat’s captain was questioned as a suspect and detained. The charges under examination are two counts of failing to provide assistance resulting in death, plus six counts of failing to provide assistance. Police suspect he never warned his crew after the impact, skipped rescue protocols, did nothing to help those in the water and kept the vessel moving. He made no substantial statement about the accusations.
Investigators have inspected both boats. Experts in IT and water rescue are working on the case, and 25 witnesses have been interviewed so far, among them crew, passengers and people who watched from outside. The aim is to find out whether anyone bears criminal responsibility.
What the wreckage says
Mihály Tóth, spokesman for the Hungarian National Shipping Association (Mahosz), spoke on the M1 news channel on Monday. The motorboat’s make suggests real speed, he said, and the damage points to an impact at high speed. Its engine looked to be around 190 horsepower.
The detail that matters is what is missing. Hobby boats do not have to carry recording systems, and most do not, so analysts will have to work backwards from the debris to judge how the boat was steered and how fast it was going.
Tóth called accidents on the Hungarian section of the Danube rare, since following the rules prevents them. More hobby boats on the water raise the odds, though, especially with skippers who are unused to night navigation or do not fully comply with regulations. In his view the hotel boat was sticking to its prescribed route, which would fit a captain who never noticed the collision.
The search for the five missing passengers goes on.
