RT spoke to Roman Lizalin, the captain of the vessel Arabella, which rescued all 77 survivors from the cruiser Bulgaria. The latter boat sank on Sunday, killing at least 113 people, including 27 children, while over a dozen remain missing.
RT: Captain Lizalin, thank you very much for this interview. Your ship was the first to come to the rescue of the sinking cruise ship Bulgaria. How did you become aware of the tragedy?
Roman Lizalin: Yes, we were the first to help. We were sailing in the same direction as the Bulgaria, and we picked up on the radio just bits of conversations between some ships, we couldn't make out what the ships were, but we heard them talk of seeing people overboard and speculating that it looked like a boat or a small ship had capsized. Once we heard that we put on more speed to get there faster. When we did arrive at the tragedy site we saw terrible things, and only when realized that it was the pleasure boat Bulgaria that had sunk did the true scope of the disaster strike us.
RT: How long did it take you to get to the scene?
RL: I would say about five to 10 minutes, 15 at most, from the moment we heard the radio talk. It all happened very quickly. As we were nearing the site we began to figure out how many people there were in the water, although that was hard to do because there was a lot of debris floating around as well. It was very hard to pick out individual people from among the floating debris. It was a truly tragic picture that we saw.
RT: What condition were these people in? Were they panic-stricken? What were they saying?
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