Category Archives: casualties

Senior offi­cials in the mar­itime acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tion depart­ment of the Panama Mar­itime Author­ity have told Mar­itime Acci­dent Case­book that fraud is still being con­sid­ered in the dis­ap­pear­ance of the gen­eral cargo car­rier M/V Rez­zak ear­lier this year. Panama and other states involved in the case includ­ing India, Rus­sia and Turkey are plan­ning a $1.3 under­wa­ter search for the miss­ing vessel.

Noth­ing has been heard from the 26-year old, 3009 tonne M/V Rez­zak or her 25-strong Indian crew since she dis­ap­peared fol­low­ing her depar­ture from the Russ­ian port of Novorossiysk on Feb­ru­ary 17 with a cargo of 2,800 tonnes of steel bil­lets, bound for Bartin Lamani in Turkey. Sev­eral mem­bers of the crew’s fam­ily believe they may still be alive and held against their will and some claim that the crews’ cell­phone were work­ing for some­time after her disappearance.

Another ship, the tug Jupiter 6, with the same man­ning agent, Pel­i­can, and an Indian crew dis­ap­peared in Sep­tem­ber 2005. The EPIRB of the Jupiter 6 was man­u­ally acti­vated some 33 days after radio con­tacts was lost. In that case, too, there were odd cell­phone issues.

The Indian gov­ern­ment says that the inci­dent has “shaken”the government’s con­fi­dence in its mar­itime train­ing pol­icy. Kiran Dhinga, India’s Direc­tor Gen­eral of Ship­ping, asked for a re-investigation of the inci­dent at an IMO meet­ing last month. She is quoted in the Indian press as say­ing that fol­low­ing her crit­i­cism of the ‘the fun­da­men­tal safety mech­a­nism of IMO and every safety mech­a­nism ever put in place by it’ : “The sec­re­tary gen­eral (IMO Secretary-General Efthimios E. Mitropou­los of IMO organ­ised a meet­ing in his cham­bers with the del­e­ga­tion of the con­cerned states and the sub­stan­tially inter­ested state (India), request­ing them to work in close coop­er­a­tion in trac­ing the miss­ing ship as soon as possible.”

Engi­neer Ger­ardo Varela, chief mar­itime inves­ti­ga­tor for Panama’s Mar­itime Author­ity arrived in Turkey this week to join another inves­ti­ga­tor who has been there since Feb­ru­ary co-operating with the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment. Piracy has been ruled out due to the weather con­di­tions at the time of the dis­ap­pear­ance but the pos­si­bil­ity of fraud is still being considered.

One of the inves­ti­ga­tors involved told MAC: “We have not dis­carded the pos­si­bil­ity of fraude, as there is so much infor­ma­tion col­lected which lead us to that hypoth­e­sis. For exam­ple, a life raft was found with the vessel’s pre­vi­ous name writ­ten in the raft’s plas­tic and not on the out­side, where the cur­rent vessel’s name must be writ­ten. Also, if the Cap­tain knew that there was bad weather in that area, why did he con­tinue to sail in that same area?”

The sea­wor­thi­ness of M/V Rez­zak has been ques­tioned but the inves­ti­ga­tor says that although a num­ber of defi­cien­cies orig­i­nally led to the deten­tion of the Rez­zak for two weeks, the rel­e­vant Port State Con­trol autho­rised the vessel’s depar­ture after the defi­cien­cies were rec­ti­fied and ver­i­fied by its clas­si­fi­ca­tion soci­ety, NKK, a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Soci­eties. Among the items replaced on the ves­sel was its EPIRB unit, which was not trig­gered dur­ing the disappearance.

Cur­rently, an eight-day under­wa­ter search for the Rez­zak is planned cost­ing $1.3 and fund­ing for the project is being sought from the four involved coun­tries, India, Turkey, Rus­sia and Panama.

See Also: “Ghostly Goings On — The Rez­zak Mystery”