Tuesday - August 11, 2009

Pirates off the UK coast? International hunt launched as cargo ship vanishes into thin air.

C’mon. How does something this big get lost?  A couple of interesting questions and a clever answer.

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 4:58 PM on 11th August 2009

An international search has been launched after a cargo ship seemingly vanished into thin air as it passed through the Straits of Dover.

The Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea and its 13 Russian crewmembers has not been heard from since a last communication with the Dover coast guards on July 28.

The 4,700-tonne ship was carrying a load of timber worth £1.13million from Finland to Algeria.

It failed to arrive at the Algerian port of Bejaia on August 4 as planned. The last communication with it occurred on July 28 during a routine check with the coast guard as it passed through the Straits of Dover on its way to the Baltic Sea, a Maritime and Coastguard Agency spokesman said.

The man who spoke with the coastguard gave all the correct information and said nothing to set off alarm bells, the spokesman told the MailOnline.

‘On July 28, the ship literally disappeared - no communication, no data on its location, not from the owners, nor relatives, nor Lloyds,’ reported the Russian maritime journal Sovfracht.

‘This is the first time in modern times that we have ever heard of someone trying to take over a ship in northern European waters,’ the coastguard spokesman said.

Piracy is an increasing problem in international waters, but most attacks have taken place in the seas off the coast of Africa, Somalia in particular.

A Portuguese search plane is understood to have spotted the ship, though officials could not say when. Spanish officials said the ship had not passed through the Straits of Gibraltar.

Mikhail Voitenko, editor-in-chief of the Maritime Bulletin, told the ITAR-Tass agency: ‘It is absolutely impossible to capture the ship with some criminal purposes in European waters.

‘If the ship is not hidden somewhere in Europe currently it may be anywhere within the range of 3,000 to 3,500 miles. So, all communication means are switched off or destroyed aboard the ship and it is going in an unknown direction.’

Now the Russian navy has joined the search for the boat. ITAR-Tass says ships from Russia’s Black Sea fleet will begin searching for the Arctic Sea and its 15 Russian crew members beginning today.

Days earlier, on July 24, masked men who identified themselves as police officers briefly seized the ship in Swedish waters and beat up the crew.

But Swedish authorities said they hadn’t searched any ships.

Russian maritime expert Mikhail Voitenko said the ship’s cargo belonged to Finnish wood products giant Stora Enso Oyj and could be worth up to $1.5 million.

The ship, originally called Okhotsk, was built in 1991, has a Russian crew of 13 and is operated by a firm based in the Russian port of Arkhangelsk, according to data at the end of March.

Some of the earlier quoted reports in the Russian media stated there were 15 crew at the time of the boarding, and that the ship was transporting Finnish timber to Algeria. They also stated the earlier incident was being investigated in Sweden.

SOURCE

Have I missed something? If the ship was going from Finland to Algeria, why, when it was going through the Dover Straits, was it heading for the Baltic Sea, as the article says? Shouldn’t it have been going the other way towards the Atlantic?

- Roy, Bexhill, E. Sussex, 11/8/2009 18:31

There are also pirates within the UK coast robbing the taxpayer, their leader, Gordon, and his crew have a hideout somewhere in London. Their pirate ship is called the Expenses.

- G Brown, Manchester UK, 11/8/2009 17:34

So this ship was en route from Finland to Algeria, Scandinavia to Africa, but to complete this trip the crew went through the straits of Dover heading for the Baltic, no wonder they have gone missing.

- Martin, peterborough, cambs, 11/8/2009 17:20

Unless it’s been scuttled professionally, you do not lose something that big that easily - not with constant sat-recon going on........ But you CAN disguise it to look like something else. How about looking for a ship which has APPEARED from nowhere, instead......?

- Robert, Worcester UK, 11/8/2009 17:15

Posted by peiper     on 08/11/2009 at 01:09 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous • UK • work and the workplace •  
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