300 stuck on burning ferry off Italy coast

Athens: Rescuers battled in the dark on Sunday to save more than 300 trapped passengers from a burning Italian ferry as coastguards reported the first death in the high-seas drama. As darkness fell, teams from Greece, Italy and Albania who had coped with gale-force winds and billowing smoke earlier in the day, pressed on with efforts to retrieve more passengers. The Italian coastguard confirmed the first death in the disaster, saying it had plucked a man's body from the water around the ferry.

The unnamed victim, a Greek national, was being transferred to the Italian port of Brindisi on a patrol boat.Greek officials said a Greek woman who had been in the same part of the stricken “Norman Atlantic” as the deceased had been rescued.

The blaze on the ferry was said to have started on the car deck when the vessel was some 44 nautical miles northwest of the Greek island of Corfu. Desperate passengers pleaded by mobile phone live on TV to be saved from the vessel which was travelling from the Greek port of Patras to Ancona in Italy.