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

A filephoto taken in Nov., 1999 of  ferry Al Salam 98, which has sunk in the Red Sea overnight on Feb. 3, 2006. [Xinhua photo]

    The report cited Red Sea Governor Bakr el-Rashidi as saying that the rescued were evacuated on board of a naval destroyer named Sharm el-sheikh, adding that search operations were still going on.

    Local police said that poor weather has seriously hampered the rescue work.

    A source at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Safaga, where the coordinating center of the rescue work was based, said earlier that a total of 185 bodies have been recovered.

    The Safaga port is some 600 km southeast of the capital Cairo. The disaster 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, called Al-Salaam 98, 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, a 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