A BOY and girl trapped in a sinking South Korean ferry with hundreds of other high school students tied their life jacket cords together, a diver who recovered their bodies said.

    “I started to cry thinking that they didn’t want to leave each other,” he told the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper Thursday.

    The parents of the boy whose shaking voice first raised the alarm that an overloaded ferry was sinking believed his body has also been found, the coast guard said. The parents had seen his body and clothes and concluded he was their son, but he has not been formally identified.

    The body of a third Chinese national on board the ship was also recovered.

    More than 300 people, most of them students and teachers from the Danwon High School, are dead or missing and presumed dead after the April 16 disaster. The confirmed death toll Thursday was 171. Investigations are focused on human error and mechanical failure.

    Prosecutors said they had raided two shipping watchdogs, the Korean Shipping Association and the Korean Register of Shipping, as part of their expanded investigation into the disaster. Prosecutors have also raided the home of Yoo Byung-un, the head of a family that owns the Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd., the company that operated the Sewol. (SD-Agencies)