Boy and girl drowned with life jackets tied together

S L euters A boy and girl trapped in a sinking South Korean ferry with hundreds of other high school students tied their life jacket cords together, a diver who recovered their bodies said, presumably so they wouldn t float apart.

The diver had to separate the two because he could not carry two corpses up to the surface at the same time.

“I started to cry thinking that they didn t want to leave each other,” he told the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper on the island of Jindo on Thursday, near where the overloaded ferry went down last week.

The parents of the boy whose shaking voice first raised the alarm that an overloaded ferry was sinking believe his body has also been found, the coastguard said.

The parents had seen his body and clothes and concluded he was their son, but he has not been formally identified.

More than 300 people, most of them students and teachers from the anwon igh School, are dead or missing and presumed dead after the April 16 disaster. The confi death toll on Thursday was 171.

The Sewol ferry sank on a routine trip from the port of Incheon, near Seoul, to the southern holiday island of Jeju. Investigations are focused on human error and mechanical failure.

Prosecutors said they had raided two shipping watchdogs, the Korean Shipping Association and the Korean egister of Shipping, as part of their expanded investigation into the disaster. Yonhap news agency said they would investigate whether ship safety certificates were in order.

“The objective was to investigate malpractices and corruption in the entire shipping industry,” Song In-taek, head deputy chief prosecutor at Incheon istrict Prosecution Service, told reporters.