HURGHADA, Egypt – Omar Ahmad Qenawy swam for nearly an hour through the choppy waters of the Red Sea, relying only on an open suitcase for flotation before he could find a barrel that contained uninflated lifeboats. A crewman from the ship shouted instructions on how to inflate the boats with the remains of a sinking ship all around. Mr. Qenawy then floated for nearly 24 more hours, waiting for rescue boats that never came.

“There was no rescue effort,” Mr. Qenawy, a 44-year-old driver who boarded the Al Salam Boccaccio 98 on Thursday from Doba to return home after working a stint in Kuwait. “The Egyptians did not help us. It was an Indian ship that helped us. They gave us milk, a change of clothes, and gave us blankets to keep warm.” When the Egyptian rescuers finally did come out to sea, according to Mr. Qenawy and a fellow survivor, they did not even offer the victims aspirin.

Mr. Qenawy’s story is typical of many of the survivors of what will likely go down as the worst maritime accident in modern Egyptian history. Three days after the crash, the government estimates that perhaps 400 of the 1,400 passengers survived. A 19-year-old student returning from his studies in Jeddah, Ahmad Mohmad Hafez, said he had to wait 34 hours hanging onto the side of a capsized lifeboat with 14 other people before an Egyptian naval vessel found him and his companions.

Each component of the ferry disaster – the poor conditions of the ship, the rescue effort, clashes between police and mourners – could spell trouble for President Mubarak, who oversees a police state that implicitly asks its citizens to compromise personal freedom in exchange for security and efficiency of government services. Mr. Mubarak has withstood public storms over transportation disasters before. Nearly four years ago, a train from Cairo to Aswan caught fire and at least 300 people died.

But the likely scale of the ferry disaster and early response could spiral into something worse. Even state-run newspapers are playing up the catastrophe, calling the popular passenger ships that leave from Safaga, “ferries of death.” Al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading newspaper (also funded by the state) referred to the incident as “Egypt’s Titanic.” About 1,500 died when the Titanic sank in 1912.

The political leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said his party’s members of parliament were demanding an inquiry. “We demand the Egyptian government to perform speedy inquiries on the incident and its circumstances and the reasons behind it and to announce the results of such inquiries to the public,” Mohammed Habib said. “We should question those who were negligent and frivolous so as that this disaster does not occur again.” The brothers control 88 seats in the people’s assembly after they were allowed to run openly in legislative elections for the first time in November.

Mr. Mubarak on Saturday reminded Egyptians that as a people they accepted the hand of God and asked the almighty to accept the drowned as martyrs. He also said that the families of the dead would receive $5,234.29 and the survivors would receive half that as compensation from the state. His spokesman said the president had already demanded an inquiry.

One potential pitfall for Mr. Mubarak is the question many mourners were already asking this weekend: How could the government allow for such a ship to carry passengers in the first place? “I took this ferry in January,” Abdel Salem Mohammed Shu’eeb said, waiting outside the port. “The stairwell to exit the boat is too narrow. In an emergency no one could get to the boats. And it was in very bad condition.”

The 36-year-old ship was flying under a Panamanian flag and was reportedly purchased in Italy. Egyptian law does not allow ships that are older than 15 years to carry civilian passengers.

Also, the company that inspected the ship faces prosecution in France for certifying a Maltese tanker that crashed off France in 2000. A member of parliament who is also the owner of a shipping company, Mohammed Messelehy, told Al-Ahram over the weekend that the agency charged with inspecting ships has failed in recent years to do its job.

The owner of the Al-Salaam Maritime Transport Company, Mamdouh Ismail, is a member of the Shura Council, the upper house of Egypt’s parliament.

With all these open questions, questions of corruption arose. When asked about the possibility of corruption playing a role in the poor oversight of the ferry, Mr. Habib said, “We have heard of this, and the members of parliament are seeking to open these files.”

On Saturday, Mr. Ismail said his company was offering to compensate the families of the dead with $26,000 apiece, but blamed the accident on poor weather conditions. “As for the accident complications, it is quite early to determine the actual causes, as all the authorities and company officers now are mainly concerned with the rescue operations as first priority,” a statement from the Mr. Ismail’s Cairo-based offices said.

The captain of the ship was reportedly nowhere to be found, and some reports said he had fled.

By Sunday the survivors were moved to the spotless tile-floored wing of the general hospital in Hurghada, an area usually reserved for tourists. Soaking clothes and other remnants of hours stranded at sea were already removed from site or left on the rescue boats. In the hospital’s main lobby, relatives and friends paced and smoked despite posters warning them not to.

At the hospital, a friend of Mr. Qenawy, Sayyid Abder Rahim Ahmed, got into an argument with an Egyptian reporter who asked him not to tell this foreign journalist negative things about his homeland. “Why should we be good to our homeland when our homeland has not been good to us?” he asked.