A tanker went missing from the coast of Gabon with 17 Georgian sailors on board, officials said on Tuesday. The vessel is Panamanian-flagged and owned by a Greek company, Lotus Shipping Co. Ltd.
Specialist websites list the 121-metre ship, the Pantelena, as a 7000-tonne, 12-year-old dual-purpose oil or chemical tanker.
Is it pirates?
The Georgian foreign ministry in Tbilissi, in a statement issued last Friday, said there were concerns for 17 Georgian sailors onboard and a search operation was being conducted with the help of the British maritime authorities.
Gabon lies on the southern part of the Gulf of Guinea – the great bend in the coastline of West Africa – where pirates are a notorious problem for shipping.
The Pantelena “turned off its locator beacon,” a device that tracks a vessel’s position by satellite, a regional military official said.
“The first thing that pirates do when they board a ship is to cut off this beacon.”
The ship “disappeared” from tracking screens on August 14, the source said, while regional military officials said the potential search area was between the Gabonese coast and the Sao Tome and Principe archipelago.
Patrol on the Gabonese coast
After a crew member aboard a ship sailing between Libreville and Port-Gentil, Gabon’s economic hub, told AFP: “We received a distress message over the radio and we alerted the Gabonese navy.” A Gabonese navy official confirmed, “We received an alert… about the Pantelena, but we didn’t have enough information to intervene.”
In Sao Tome and Principe, which is located about 260km from Gabon, the commander of the local coastguard, Joao Idalecio, said it had dispatched a patrol vessel with a crew of 30 to search for the tanker.
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Source: News24
