Egypt: How a long research ended in an uncanny coincidence

Perhaps the story of this coincidental research must begin in a transit hotel in the Indonesian province of Papua Barat Daya. The hotel and the city that surrounds it would be the stuff of a novel. It is a hub for stories and adventures. Even ones that perhaps seem a little bigger every time they are told. But that is another topic.

Travelers from all over the world spend a night in this hotel, usually just one. And only during the day if you have to, because you still sleep better in the squat seating areas of the hypothermic lobby than on the seat frames at the local airport.

Many of these travelers are divers. You have around 20 hours of flying behind you or ahead of you. And above all, time in a special world. The marine area of ​​Raja Ampat, remote and only accessible by boat, is one of the most biodiverse diving areas in the world. The water there is often clear as glass, sharks patrol the colorful reefs in large numbers, between corals of all colors and shapes. The schools of fish can be so large and dense that a diver can completely disappear into them.

On a January evening, shortly after New Year’s Day 2020, a strange woman sat down at our table in the restaurant of the Transit Hotel. American, as it quickly turned out.

“How are you?” I asked, hopefully politely, but not in the mood for small talk.

“We almost died just now,” she said.

She, her husband and her children almost died. On a wooden diving boat. She said it caught fire in the middle of the night and burned out in no time.

She talked about the journey and a dramatic escape through ship hatches. I said that I had been researching accidents involving diving vessels like yours for some time and now knew that they happened particularly often in two areas of the world: Southeast Asia and the Red Sea, especially in Egypt. It was a long conversation.

A few weeks later, Corona hit the world. Nobody was interested in diving ships anymore.

Corona left, the year 2023 came. People started traveling again, including to Indonesia and Egypt, and diving ships sank there again. The Red Sea became the scene of a scary series of accidents.

When the next safari yacht burned out in February 2024, with many German divers on board and one apparently dead, my colleague Tina Kaiser and I decided to start the research again. And to find the survivors of this accident and to reconstruct how it happened.

The first conversations already gave solid indications that this case also fit into a pattern that we knew well. Little by little, we compiled dozens of conversations, as well as documents, photos and video material from the “Sea Legend” and its fire. Everything fell into place.

Experts have been criticizing the safety of many diving yachts for years. Poorly constructed ships. Poor safety standards on board. A crew that seems overwhelmed in an emergency because they are often not properly trained. Egyptian investigators who afterwards give the impression that they don’t really want to investigate in detail.

Egypt, experts say, thrives on tourists, from Germany among others. Diving trips, a week on a ship that travels to remote places in the underwater world, have long been a lucrative business for the providers. The many accidents and dead divers are rather inconvenient.

But I don’t want to tell you our whole report. What I’m getting at is an almost frightening coincidence.

Our research was published in November of this year star. And less than two days later, news agencies broadcast the report around the world.

It soon became clear that many divers were missing and there were early fears that there would be several deaths. We researched who the operator of the ship was. It was the same company whose case from February we had reconstructed and just published.

The company’s second sunk ship this year. And divers died again.