Coast Guard sends seaplane to look for missing Viet ship

The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is sending one of its seaplanes to scour the waters off northern Luzon Thursday for a Vietnamese cargo ship that went missing amid bad weather on Christmas Day.

The 190-meter long bulk carrier Vinalines Queen, carrying 22 crew members, went missing at around 7 a.m. on December 25 off Batanes province. Philippine, Japanese and Taiwanese coast guards and air forces have since launched a search.

“We haven’t called off the search. Our search and rescue operations continue in the vicinity of where we believe the ship was when it went missing. But we still don’t know the precise location where it sank,” PCG spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Algier Ricafrente said in a phone interview.

On December 30, Vietnam’s Marine Rescue Cooperation Center received information from the Taiwanese rescue agency that a British-flagged ship, the London Courage, had found a live crew member of the missing vessel, adrift on a life raft.

According to Vietnamese media reports, the rescued crew member, Dau Ngoc Hung, claimed that the Vinalines Queen had sunk and that he was the sole survivor. Hung was rescued around 350 kilometers west from the area where the ship sent its last distress signal.  Jerome Aning