[Breaking news update, posted at 12:15 a.m. ET]
The captain and the chief engineer of the Chinese passenger ship that sank in the Yangtze River have been taken into custody by police, China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV reported.
[Previous story, posted at 11:45 p.m. ET]
Chinese rescuers are scrambling to find survivors from a passenger ship that sank in the Yangtze River with 458 people aboard late Monday, authorities said.
The rescue workers have heard sounds from within the capsized ship and are trying to reach the people they believe are inside the cabin, state media reported Tuesday.
Twelve survivors have been rescued so far — including the captain and the chief engineer — and five bodies have been recovered, according to the Hubei Daily, a state-run newspaper.
But there was no word on the fate of the hundreds of other people on the ship.
Images from the scene showed the ship upside down in the river, a section of its hull protruding above the surface of the water.
China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV carried video of rescue workers walking on the exposed part of the upturned ship. One of them was lying flat on the hull, tapping against the metal with a small hammer.
Divers who knocked on the ship under the water heard responses from inside, the Chutian Metro Daily, a state-run newspaper, reported. It said welders were trying to cut open the cabin.
The ship, the Eastern Star, went down around 9:30 p.m. Monday during a storm over the section of the river that flows through the central province of Hubei, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reported, citing the Yangtze River navigation administration.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and other senior officials are on their way to the site of the accident in Hubei’s Jianli county to oversee the emergency response, the news agency said.
The rescue efforts were initially complicated by bad weather, according to Xinhua.
The Eastern Star was reported to have been traveling from Nanjing in eastern China to Chongqing, a city more than 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) inland. Xinhua said that there were 406 passengers, 47 crew members and five travel agency workers on board.
The Yangtze is the third-longest river in the world, stretching 6,300 kilometers (3,915 miles) from its source in the mountains of Tibet all the way to the East China Sea.
