MANILA - MORE than 700 passengers and crew aboard a ferry that sank in typhoon-battered seas in the central Philippines are missing and feared dead.

The MV Princess of the Stars capsized on Saturday afternoon a few kilometres off the coast of Sibuyan Island after being battered by huge waves, when its engines failed, said officials.

By yesterday evening, only four people were known to have survived after making it to the shore. One of them, a crew member, said that the ferry's captain gave orders to abandon ship after it listed, 'sending passengers and crew scrambling for life rafts'.

'It seemed like everything happened in fifteen minutes. Next thing we knew, the ship had gone under,' Mr Reynato Lanorio told DZBB radio.

Four people aboard the ferry have so far been confirmed dead after their bodies were washed ashore.

Typhoon Fengshen - packing top winds of 120kmh - lashed the Philippines over the weekend, leaving at least 229 people dead, according to the latest count of the Philippine Red Cross.

The typhoon headed north-west yesterday, dumping torrential rains on Manila, with power being knocked out in large parts and many domestic and international flights being cancelled.

'We got hit real bad this time,' Senator Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross, told a local television network.

Distraught relatives of the ferry passengers gathered at the offices of the vessel's owners, Sulpicio Lines, in Manila's port area waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones.

The manifest showed 626 passengers and 121 crewmen aboard when the ferry sailed from Manila on Friday for the central city of Cebu.

Coast guard spokesman Lieutenant Armand Balilo said that rescue teams had reached the sunken ferry, which had turned upside down, yesterday afternoon. He told ABS-CBN news that divers have not yet been deployed to check for trapped passengers inside the ferry because of heavy waves and strong winds.

Many Filipinos use the cheap but sometimes dangerously overloaded vessels to travel around this scattered archipelago - and terrible accidents have happened.

In 1987, the ferry Dona Paz, also owned by Sulpicio Lines, collided with an oil tanker in the central Philippines. The official death toll was 1,565, but survivors said the ferry was overloaded and as many as 4,000 people may have been killed.

President Gloria Arroyo, who left for a visit to the United States on Saturday, demanded to know from the coast guard why the ferry had been allowed to sail from Manila with a typhoon about to hit the country.

Fengshen is expected to exit the north of the country by today, heading to Taiwan, where it could make landfall in the next few days, according to weather experts.

WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

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