safety. Also, all four crew members disappeared at one time or another and the firefighters didn't see them again. According to several Swedish firefighters and salvage workers, three unknown men emerged from the ship during the night at Lysekil Harbour and quickly disappeared before the firefighters could alert the police. Shortly thereafter, an enormous fire broke out in the ship's front restaurant area. This fire quickly rose to temperatures so high that firefighters were unable to put out the fire for another 12 hours. According to the fire brigade, there had been no previous fires anywhere near the restaurant. Several large and suspicious fires had hit Scandinavian Star and her sister ships while they were sailing in the Caribbean. In 1984 a fire completely destroyed MS Scandinavian Sea and its value was written down to zero (thereby triggering payout of the full insurance sum). Scandinavian Star was far from seaworthy when it started sailing with passengers on April 1, and the safety of the passengers was given very low priority. While the ship was docked at Cuxhaven in Germany in March, an inspector for Norwegian insurance company, Skuld, inspected the ship and gave specific instructions that several things needed to be fixed before the ship could get a liability insurance let alone travel with passengers. Among the defects were fire doors that didn't close properly, rusty sprinkler systems that couldn't be tested, a critical fire door having been replaced by an ineffective glass door and that not a single fire drill had been conducted at any time. Strangely, Skuld ended up issuing a liability insurance for the ship anyway despite the inspector's report. According to both Danish and Norwegian maritime authorities, none of them were informed in any way about Scandinavian Star, and therefore no inspection was conducted by any of them prior to April 7. According to Danish maritime authority, the ship was registered in Nassau, Bahamas and therefore only obliged to adhere to the much more lenient Bahamian safety regulations. However, in the documentary, former secretary and chairman of the Danish Association of Sailors, Henrik Berlau, alleged that the Danish maritime authorities knew that Scandinavian Star was not ready to transport passengers, before the ship was assigned to its route during the first week of April 1990. However, the maritime authorities opted to keep quiet about this after the disaster, because it might have rendered the state of