MANILA (Herald Tribune) -- The death toll from Typhoon Fengshen, the storm that battered the Philippines last week, could go as high as 1,300 if the missing passengers and crew of a capsized ferry are included, officials said.

Rescue divers continued to search the overturned ferry Thursday but failed to retrieve any new survivors, raising the possibility that as many as 809 of the 865 passengers and crew had perished in the disaster.
Since the ship capsized Saturday near Sibuyan Island, only 56 survivors have been found. The Philippine Coast Guard said 124 bodies had either washed ashore on nearby islands or had been found floating in the sea.
Adding to the uncertainty of the situation was the way in which some of the recovered bodies were being handled. On some of the islands where bodies had washed up, television footage showed corpses being dumped from a truck into mass graves. Many of the bodies had not been examined by forensic experts for possible identification.
Officials on Thursday raised the overall death toll from the storm to 498, excluding those still missing.