10 years after, we remember
Survivors and families of the 852 victims of the 1994 sinking of the "Estonia" car ferry in the Baltic Sea marked the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, calling for a new investigation into the cause of Europe's worst post-war maritime disaster.
Ceremonies were held in Sweden, Finland and Estonia, the countries hardest hit by the catastrophe that claimed victims from 17 different nations.
The Estonia sank on the night of September 27-28, 1994 off Finland's southwestern coast during a crossing from Tallinn to Stockholm. Only 137 of the 989 passengers and crew on board survived.
In Stockholm, the Foundation of the Estonia Victims and their Relatives, known by its Swedish acronym SEA, held a demonstration where members rejected the conclusions of the final investigation report and urged the Swedish government to launch a new inquiry.
Nearly 500 of those who perished were Swedish.
A joint Swedish-Finnish-Estonian commission concluded in 1997 that "weak locking devices of the bow visor" door, which had provided an entry point for cars and trucks to roll onto the ferry, had been the main cause of the tragedy.
When the locks ruptured, the outer bow door was ripped off and heavy seas gushed in, destabilizing the ship, according to the official report.
Swallowed by the sea in less than 50 minutes, the ship still lies at a depth of 80 meters (265 feet), a watery grave for the hundreds of people trapped inside the vessel when it went down.
The report did not find anyone on board guilty of criminal negligence, noting that the ferry had been judged seaworthy before the accident. The commission's conclusions were widely criticized by experts, politicians, survivors and family members of the victims.
"The government's handling of Estonia has on several occasions proven to be insufficient and faulty. The decisions to neither launch a new investigation nor recover the bodies of the dead were taken on inaccurate, or straight out false, pretenses," SEA chairman Lennart Berglund told a crowd of onlookers in Stockholm's midday lunch rush.
"The causes of Europe's worst maritime catastrophe in peacetime must be examined and people must be held responsible. That may mean that the entire ship will need to be raised," he said.
He cited the cases of the Russian Kursk submarine, which was raised after an August 2000 accident which killed 118 people, and the Norwegian catamaran ferry Sleipner, which sank in November 1999 and was raised in search of the sole missing person and to determine the cause of the sinking.
Swedish officials who were involved in the decision to not raise the ship and recover the bodies immediately after the accident have in recent days stated that though they may not have made the best decision, they did what they thought was right at the time.
Meanwhile, at an official ceremony in Stockholm on Tuesday, Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf placed a wreath of flowers at the base of the stone wall monument raised in memory of the victims.
In the background, some SEA members brandished posters reading "Bring home our relatives", a reference to the 757 bodies still at the bottom of the Baltic.
Queen Silvia, Prime Minister Goeran Persson and the ambassadors of Estonia and Finland also attended the ceremony, as did speaker of parliament Bjoern von Sydow, who spoke of the lasting "national trauma" in Sweden.
"We all live with the fear that it could happen again," he said, acknowledging that "our emergency preparedness was insufficient (and) the deficiencies have made it harder for the wounds to heal."
In Finland, a national memorial service was held in the Turku Cathedral in the southwest on Tuesday, a day after a memorial stone was unveiled in Nauvo in the Turku archipelago, near the shipwreck.
And in Tallinn, a service was held on a small hill next to the Naval Museum, located in one of the city's medieval towers.
The service was attended by hundreds of people who lost relatives in the tragedy, as well as surviving crew members and even one member of the Finnish helicopter team which rescued 44 people during the rescue operation 10 years ago.