The body of one of six sailors missing since a tugboat capsized off Busan on the 2nd was found on a beach in Pohang, the Coast Guard said, marking the first recovery of a missing crew member seven days after the accident.
The body of a missing crew member from the capsized TNS Catcher was found on a Pohang beach on the 9th, according to the Coast Guard. Of the eight sailors aboard at the time of the accident, one had been rescued and one had died. With the newly recovered body confirmed as one of the missing crew, the death toll rose to two. The whereabouts of the five other missing sailors remain unknown.
The Busan Coast Guard Station, which had struggled with search operations because of weather conditions, began its eighth night of searching in the accident area that afternoon. The Coast Guard deployed six vessels and conducted a sea search across an area measuring 31 kilometers by 70 kilometers. Military thermal observation devices (TOD) were also brought in. Aircraft were not deployed because of deteriorating weather. A high seas advisory is currently in effect for waters off Busan.
The Coast Guard analyzed closed-circuit television footage from the container ship M, which the TNS Catcher had been towing at the time of the accident, and confirmed that two crew members jumped out immediately after the vessel capsized. The Coast Guard shared that finding with the families of the missing on the 7th. It also obtained a statement on the 5th from a foreign crew member aboard the M who said he had seen two people in the water near the capsized vessel at the time of the accident.
The 286-ton tugboat TNS Catcher capsized at about 1:29 p.m. on the 2nd in waters about 9 kilometers east of Oryukdo. Eight crew members were aboard, including six South Koreans and two Indonesians.
One of the Indonesian sailors was rescued by a merchant ship near the accident site. One South Korean was pulled from inside the vessel unconscious and taken to a hospital, where he later died. The tugboat sank completely at about 3:27 p.m., roughly two hours after capsizing.
