Cargo ship collision outside Sweden kills one person, one is missing
Two cargo ships collided in the Baltic Sea off southern Sweden and one person died and another was missing on Monday. One of the ships capsized and was being towed towards a Swedish port, the authorities state. Two people have been arrested as suspects.
The Swedish Maritime Administration said that they received an alarm before dawn on Monday that two cargo ships had collided south of Ystad in Sweden, near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The authority identified the ships as the Danish-flagged Karin Hoej and a British ship, the Scot Carrier. The Danish ship capsized completely and floated up and down.
At least eleven boats and ships, an airplane and a helicopter searched for the missing crew members, but the Swedish Maritime Administration said they ended their operations on Monday without finding the couple. A body was later found inside the capsized Danish ship, it said.
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The capsized ship was towed closer to land so divers from the Swedish Armed Forces and the Coast Guard can search it. The police also plan to take over the case and to investigate the ship.
Despite fog in the area, the cause of the collision was still unclear, the Swedish Maritime Administration states.
“We have no idea when the work can be completed,” said the Swedish Maritime Administration.
The Swedish Coast Guard’s prosecutor Jonatan Tholin said that prosecutors initiated a preliminary investigation into potential accusations of gross negligence in maritime traffic and “gross sea drunkenness”.
Prosecutors said a British citizen born in 1991 and a Croatian born in 1965 were detained suspects in the case, which also includes causing another person’s death after the collision. Their names were not released.
The Coast Guard’s spokesman Valdemar Lindekrantz told TV4 that “we suspect that parts of the British crew have not been sober.”
According to the website MarineTraffic, Scot Carrier was on its way from Salacgriva in Latvia to Montrose in Scotland while Karin Hoej had left Södertälje in Sweden for Nykoebing Falster in Denmark.
TV4 reported that oil had begun to flow into the water. However, the Coast Guard said there were no ongoing discharges and it carried out work “to prevent the release of oil or other harmful substances into the sea.”