Pirate mystery as ship goes missing

[hairless17]

The whereabouts of a cargo ship is unknown amid fears that it travelled through the English Channel under the control of pirates.

An international maritime search has been launched for the Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea and its 15-strong Russian crew whose last known contact was with Dover Coastguard as it prepared to enter the Channel.

Contact was lost with the ship as it was about to enter the Strait of Dover from the North Sea at 1.52pm on July 28.

There are concerns that crew members on board the 3,988-tonne ship, carrying about £1 million of sawn timber from Finland to Algeria, may have been coerced by hijackers when contact was made with the coastguards.

Mark Clark, of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), said Dover Coastguard were unsuspecting of anything untoward as a supposed crew member radioed them before the ship journeyed through one of the world's busiest waterways.

The person on board the vessel told the coastguard that the ship was due to arrive in Bejaia in northern Algeria on August 4 at 11pm, Mr Clark said.

But its whereabouts are now shrouded in mystery amid reports that the Russian navy is set to deploy vessels to help locate the missing ship.

Mr Clark said: "When the ship contacted Dover Coastguard it could well be that a crew member had a gun put to his head by a hijacker, but who knows?

According to reports, Swedish authorities were told by the Finnish shipping line operating the vessel that on July 24 it had been boarded by up to 10 armed men purporting to be anti-drugs police as it sailed through the Baltic Sea. Some 12 hours later the intruders apparently left the ship on a high-speed inflatable boat.

On August 3 Dover Coastguard was informed by Interpol that the crew had been hijacked, but by that point the Arctic Sea had already completed its voyage through the Strait of Dover. It was last recorded on the AISLive ship tracking system off the coast of Brest, northern France, just before 1.30am on July 30.

[qasseml2003]

This is the Algerian "NAHSS" if it was going to another Land , you can get a bit about what will happen, it will be safe