[citation needed] On the night of February 26, the 10,192-ton ferry sailed out of Manila for Cagayan de Oro via Bacolod and Iloilo City with 899 recorded passengers and crew aboard.

[5] However, at the marine board of inquiry hearing in late March 2004, a safety supervisor with the ship's owner, WG&A, testified that about 150 survivors told him an explosion took place in the tourist section around the general area of bunk 51.

The Captain of the ferry, Ceferino Manzo, testified in the same hearing that the entire tourist section was engulfed in "thick black smoke that smelled like gunpowder.

A man named Redondo Cain Dellosa, a Rajah Sulaiman Movement member, confessed to planting a bomb, triggered by a timing device, on board for the Abu Sayyaf group.

It was believed that Abu Sayyaf bombed Superferry 14 because the company that owned it, WG&A, did not comply with a letter demanding $1 million in protection money.

[11] Ruben Omar Pestano Lavilla, Jr., a listed terrorist of U.S. State Department, and founder of Philippine terror group Rajah Sulaiman Movement, was arrested in Bahrain on July 24, 2008.

Anti-Terrorism Council Chairman Eduardo Ermita announced that Lavilla, the alleged mastermind of the Superferry 14 bombing, was deported from Bahrain to the Philippines on August 30.