CAIRO, Feb. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- At least 293 passengers from a sunken Egyptian ship have been found alive by rescue workers till Friday night, Egypt's official MENA news agency reported.

    Egyptian Minister of Transport Mohamed Mansour was quoted as saying that 293 people of the al-Salaam 98 have been rescued so far after the ship sank in the Red Sea overnight Friday.

    Mansour said that the rescue operation is going on despite the nightfall and rough weather condition.

    The accident occurred when the ship, with 1,414 people on board, departed from the Dubah port in Saudi Arabia for the Egyptian Red Sea port of Safaga, some 600 km southeast of the capital Cairo.

    A list of passengers obtained by Xinhua showed that 1,193 Egyptians, 99 Saudis, six Syrians, four Palestinians, one Jordanian, one national of the United Arab Emirates, one Yemeni, one Sudanese, one Indonesian, on Omani, one Canadian and one Filipino were on board the 35-year old cruiser.

    The ship is owned by the Egyptian company El-Salaam Maritime Transport Co. and it is the second time that a cruiser owned by the company suffered a major accident in less than four months.

    Al-Salaam 95, sister ship of Al-Salaam 98, carrying about 1,250 Muslim pilgrims back from Saudi Arabia, collided with a Cypriot commercial vessel in the Gulf of Suez on Oct. 17, 2005, killing at least three and injuring dozens of others. Enditem