An angry crowd of relatives of dead and missing passengers broke into the offices of Al Salam Maritime in the Egyptian port city of Safaga on Monday morning, smashing windows and throwing furniture out onto the street. The mob then dragged down the company's signboard and set a photograph of one of its ferries on fire in the middle of the street. Riot police who had been guarding the nearby port gates arrived quickly and dispersed the crowd. Some rioters also set fire to tires on the roads leading to the port. On Saturday at least 300 people broke through the police barriers and stormed the docks. They complained bitterly that there had been no concrete information about who had survived or perished when the ferry sank on Friday morning. Some threw stones at the police, who then used teargas, others directed their anger at the Egyptian authorities, shouting "Down with the Interior Ministry, down with Mubarek."

The families of the passengers are angry about the lack of information coming from the authorities and this anger has increased as more details emerge about the accident and its aftermath. When the ship sank in the early hours of Friday morning, it was carrying more than 1,400 passengers. Most were poor Egyptian men who working in Saudi Arabia or other gulf states; others were pilgrims returning from Mecca. Around 800 people are still missing, almost 400 survivors have been rescued and 195 bodies recovered. Survivors say that a fire broke out on board one or two hours after leaving the Saudi Arabian port of Duba, and some have accused the crew of ignoring warnings to evacuate and of taking lifejackets off passengers.

The large amount of water used to try to quell the fire is reported to have flooded the car deck and then pooled on one side, causing the ship to list sharply and then topple over. Survivor Ahmed Abdel Wahab said that when the fire first broke out passengers had pleaded with the crew to turn back. The crew insisted that everything was under control. He said that several women were locked in their cabins when panic broke out. "Then we heard explosions. Five minutes later, the ship sank." There is also mounting anger over reports that the captain was one of the first to leave the ship. He is still unaccounted for.

The Egyptian rescue mission has also come in for heavy criticism. It is said to only have been launched several hours after the disaster. Survivors told the BBC that the alarm system was not working and that there were not enough lifeboats and lifejackets for all the passengers. Many of the survivors who were lucky enough to get into a lifeboat or grab a lifejacket then had to wait, some for up to 24 hours, in the stormy Red Sea until they were finally rescued. Britain's Independent reports that Egyptian officials turned down a British offer to divert a warship, the HMS Bulwark, to the scene. It is still not clear why the Saudi port officials at Duba failed to raise the alarm when they lost contact with the ferry.