A man with a bleeding head wound, standing near the main road beside the Danube, set the whole thing off. Police found him late on Saturday night close to Verőce, a town north of Budapest, and from what he told them concluded he had been in some sort of boat accident. By Sunday, two people were confirmed dead and five were still missing.
Soma Csecsi, a spokesperson for the Budapest police, told Reuters that eight adults had been aboard a small motor boat when it collided with a cruise ship. Reuters put the distance from Verőce to the capital at 55 km (34 miles); ABC News in Australia gave it as around 50 kilometres.
The bodies of a man and a woman were later pulled from the water. The man was found south of Verőce. The woman turned up further downstream near a bridge on the northern edge of Budapest, and that is also where police recovered the damaged boat, Csecsi said. The five still unaccounted for are three men and two women.
The ship that kept going
The vessel police were interested in was the Heidelberg, a 109-metre Swiss river cruise ship licensed to carry 110 people, according to Hungarian public broadcaster M1. It was on a run from Budapest to Passau. Officers stopped it at Komarom, upriver from the crash site, and found signs of damage on its side. Reuters saw it moored there with large scratches on the bow.
No one aboard the cruise ship was hurt, M1 said. A group of Chinese tourists left the vessel on Sunday afternoon. One told Reuters he had known nothing about an accident.
The German outlet Boote Magazin reported that Hungarian police arrested the ship’s captain on suspicion of failing to render assistance resulting in death, since the vessel carried on after the impact. By its account, the Heidelberg was stopped about 90 kilometres on, a figure that differs from the more than 80 kilometres ABC gave.
A search along the whole river
Police said 95 personnel, 25 vessels and drones were working the Hungarian stretch of the Danube downstream of the collision. Emergency services, the magazine added, rated the chances of finding the missing alive as minimal.
Police opened a criminal investigation against an unknown perpetrator. ABC reported the suspicion as endangering water transport and causing the deaths of several people. Csecsi said the aim was to establish whether anyone bore criminal liability.
The spot is a busy one. At Verőce the river is roughly 460 metres wide, at the Danube Bend, where it swings in a near 90-degree turn to the south. Boaters like the area, and cruise ships regularly pass through on the route between Budapest and Vienna, some 230 kilometres upriver.
Budapest has been here before. In May 2019 the river cruise ship Viking Sigyn overtook the tourist boat Hableany beneath Margit Bridge and sank it within seconds. The Hableany carried 35 people, most of them South Korean tourists, and at least 27 died. The Ukrainian captain of the Viking Sigyn was found guilty of negligence in 2023 and sentenced to five years and six months in prison.
Sources
- Two dead, five missing after boat collision on Danube in Hungary
- Two dead and five missing after boat collision on Danube River in Hungary
- Shipwreck on the Danube: Captain arrested, two dead and five missing
