The captain and crew of a South Korean ferry that capsized last week with hundreds of children on board acted in a way "tantamount to murder," President Park Guen-Hye said Monday, as four more crew members were arrested.

Three more officers and an engineer were detained by police on Monday and could, prosecutors said, face similar charges of criminal negligence and deserting passengers.

In the end, the evacuation order was only given around 40 minutes after the ship ran into trouble, by which time it was listing so heavily that escape was almost impossible.

Lee has insisted he had acted in the passengers' best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Realistic hopes of finding survivors have disappeared, but families of the missing are still opposed to the use of heavy cranes to lift the ship before divers have searched every section.

It took divers more than two days to access the submerged ferry and the first bodies from inside the vessel were only recovered on Sunday.

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