Your trusted source

Divers searching a sunken passenger ferry off South Korea found 48 bodies in a single room on the vessel meant to accommodate 38 people, the BBC reported, citing officials.

The group was crammed into a dormitory and all were wearing lifejackets, a South Korean Navy officer said.

Some 183 bodies have been recovered from the Sewol, but scores of people are missing, presumed drowned.

The head of the operation to retrieve bodies said on Friday he had "no idea" how long the ship search would take.

There were 476 people on board, with many trapped inside as the ferry listed and sank within two hours of distress signals being sent. A total of 174 passengers were rescued.

Many of those who died or are presumed dead were students and teachers from Danwon high school, south of Seoul.

Furious relatives attacked the speed of the recovery operation on Friday in a confrontation with the fisheries minister and the coastguard chief.

In a briefing to reporters on the southern island of Jindo, Navy Captain Kim Jin-Hwang described the difficult conditions that the divers were facing.

He said one group had found the single dormitory room filled with the bodies of 48 students wearing lifejackets. The presence of so many victims in the cabin suggested many had run into the room when the ship tilted, correspondents said.

"It's very stressful," Kim said, adding that the divers were all too aware of criticism over the speed of the search.

Retrieving the bodies was far harder than finding them, he said, with divers unable to spend much longer than 10 minutes inside the ship at a time.

"Just imagine a room that is flipped," one of the divers told the Associated Press news agency. "Everything is floating around, and it's hard to know exactly where they are."