Hungarian police on Sunday said that two people have died and five others were missing after a cruise ship and a motorboat collided on the Danube in the country’s north.
Rescue teams reinforced by 25 boats, a helicopter and several drones were continuing their search for survivors late on Sunday.
On Saturday night, a man had been found with a bleeding head injury near the village of Veroce, 55 kilometres (34 miles) north of the capital Budapest, authorities said.
He was suspected of having been involved in a “river accident, possibly a boat accident”, with police immediately searching the area.
Hours into the search, the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered as well as a damaged small motorboat, which was brought to shore.
The motorboat was carrying “eight adults, five of whom — three men and two women — are still being actively searched for as missing,” police spokesperson Soma Csecsi told a press conference on Sunday.
Authorities also said they had determined that a cruise ship had been in the area at the time of the accident.
Police later stopped a cruise boat with visible hull damage near the town of Komarom, further upstream.
Hungarian Telex news-site identified the cruise ship as the Swiss-registered, two-storey Heidelberg, and reported that police were inspecting the vessel.
The report also said that the approximately 110 passengers on board were being questioned by police.
The cause of the accident was unclear.
Authorities have initiated criminal proceedings against an unknown perpetrator on suspicion of endangering water traffic, resulting in multiple deaths.
In May 2019, Hungary’s worst boating accident in more than half a century saw two vessels collide on the Danube in Budapest, killing 25 South Korean tourists and two Hungarian crew members.
